Visual Studio File Installations and Combinations

Question

I have been working with VS10 for years, and yesterday I installed VS12 side by side with the old one. Now I noticed that some file associations are incompatible. Projects are opened by the version selector, C ++ files VS10 and FSX files with VS12, and much more from this mess. Everything is a bit random, and I wanted to display everything on VS12 while still having VS10 when I use XNA, and you know that VS12 does not yet have official XNA support.

A SO search is found I only need to go to Options> General> Restore File Associations, but now it is called Manage File Associations, and the control panel opens and allows me to choose for each available VS format that I want:

I can check the box to select all available formats, but ... I don’t like this idea because it can break something.

Does anyone have good advice if my doubts were wrong - but how do I manage associations without breaking anything?

Answer 1

This is a pretty fundamental limitation on how file associations work on Windows. It works well when you click a solution or project file. They are associated with the small utility VSLauncher.exe. Which looks at the file for the version of the format and, therefore, knows which version of VS to run.

The same trick does not work for a source code file, such as a .cpp or .cs file. There is not enough information in the file to reliably select the VS version. This is just code, most of which will compile correctly in any new version of VS. Therefore, it is simply associated with any version of VS that you installed last.