Opening Visual Studio solutions from Explorer in Vista

You’ve installed Visual Studio 2005 on Vista and dutifully changed it to run as administrator, like you’re supposed to. And then…

Problem: Visual Studio 2005 solutions no longer open when you double-click them in Windows Vista. In fact, when you double-click nothing happens.

Solution: Change them to open with Visual Studio 2005 directly instead of the vslauncher.exe (which opens up the solution with the correct version of Visual Studio if you have more than one).

Caveat: Only makes sense if  you use only Visual Studio 2005.

How-to:

  1. Right-click on a solution file.
  2. Choose “Open With…”
  3. Choose “Browse…”
  4. Browse to file “C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\Common7\IDE\devenv.exe” (or wherever you installed Visual Studio)
  5. Click “Open” button
  6. Check “Always use the selected program to open this kind of file”

openwith

Now your solutions will load Visual Studio, bring up the UAC prompt, and it all works great.

Found via here and here.