When I installed Windows 7, double-clicking on .SLN files to load them in Visual Studio stopped working – I would get the hourglass for a few moments, and then nothing. It turns out that it’s because I had set Visual Studio to always run as an Administrator, but when you double-click a .SLN file, you’re not actually running Visual Studio – you’re running the “Visual Studio Version Selector”, even if you only have one version of Visual Studio installed.
To resolve the problem, you’ll need to set the Version Selector to also run as an Administrator – to do this, find the Version Selector EXE:
C:\Program Files\Common Files\microsoft shared\MSEnv\VSLauncher.EXE (or “Program Files (x86)” if you have an x64 installation)
Right-click on it, go to the “Compatibility” tab, and check the box that says “Run this program as an administrator”. Since I have multiple users on my laptop that I use for development, I had to click “Change Settings for all users” before checking the “Run as admin” box.
Voila! The VS Version Selector will now properly load the solution files when you double-click on them – enjoy!
Thanks for that. I knew the selector was the problem, because I had set both vs2008 and vs2010 to always run as admin but they still wouldn’t open. The tricky bit was figuring out where the selector executable was, and you provided that 🙂
Cheers!