Visual Studio Hacks

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Chapter 1, Master Projects and Solutions

#4 Hack the Project and Solution Files

HACK

By using Enterprise Templates, you can also take advantage of some prefab-

ricated projects called building blocks that are located under the Enterprise

Template Project folder in the New Project dialog. An architect could create

a number of Enterprise Templates to dictate how solutions should be built

and organized inside his organization. Instead of starting from scratch,

developers would use the template to dictate their general architecture.

HACK

#4

Hack the Project and Solution Files Hack #4

Discover the format of these two Visual Studio files and learn about a tool to

convert these files between versions of Visual Studio.

Solution and project files are an essential part of working with Visual Stu-

dio. You will almost always work with the solution and project files through

the IDE, whether adding projects to your solution or configuring your

project. The purpose of this hack is to describe the format of these files for

two reasons. If your project or solution files become corrupted, knowing the

structure of these files might help you fix the file without having to re-create

the entire project or solution. Also, knowing the structure of these files will

help you if you want to convert these files or write a tool that works directly

with these files.

You must edit these files with extreme care. The format of

these files is not published or documented and could change

drastically in future versions. You should normally need to

work with these files only through the IDE, and unless you

find a compelling reason to, I would not directly edit these

files. If you are interested only in converting the version of

these files, then you may want to look toward the end of this

hack under “Project and Solution File Conversion” to read

about a tool that will do the conversion for you.

Solution Files

Visual Studio creates two separate files when you create a new solution in

Visual Studio. The first file is the .suo (solution user options) file, which

stores user settings such as the location of your breakpoints. This file is

stored in binary format, which does not lend itself to easy editing. Since

there are no compelling reasons to edit this file, I am not going to document

the format of it here. If you think that this file is preventing your solution

from opening, you can actually delete the file and Visual Studio will create a

new one when you open the solution and save it when you close the IDE. By

deleting the file, you will lose any of your user-specific settings like break-

points, but this is a small price to pay for saving your solution. The .suo file

Hack the Project and Solution Files #4

Chapter 1, Master Projects and Solutions

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HACK

is a hidden file, so you will need to make sure Windows Explorer is config-

ured to show hidden files (this can be set through Tools

➝ Folder Options ➝

View in any Explorer window).

The second file that Visual Studio creates is the .sln file. This file stores

information about the projects that make up this solution, source control

settings, and other global settings that apply to all of the projects in the solu-

tion.

The first line of the solution file contains a declaration including the version

of Visual Studio that this solution is built for:

Microsoft Visual Studio Solution File, Format Version 8.0

The version number used in the solution file is a little different than the ver-

sion number you are used to seeing in the Visual Studio product name.

Visual Studio .NET 2002 solution files have a version number of 7.0. Visual

Studio .NET 2003 solution files have a version number of 8.0 (as opposed to

the 7.1 number you are used to), and Visual Studio 2005 solutions files have

a version number of 9.0. Visual Studio 2005 Beta 1 contains an additional

line under this first line, which contains just the following:

# Visual Studio 2005

This line causes the icon of the file to be changed to a Visual Studio 2005-

specific icon, and if removed, will prevent Visual Studio from opening this

file when you double-click on it.

The next portion of the solution file contains a section for each of the

projects that are contained in this solution:

Project("{FAE04EC0-301F-11D3-BF4B-00C04F79EFBC}") = "HacksWinApp",

"HacksWinApp\HacksWinApp.csproj",

"{75B7D1AE-1896-409D-B717-64D9AFCF0F59}"

ProjectSection(ProjectDependencies) = postProject

{89EE0E8E-C5C6-4772-A5EE-D347E40FB0E4} =

{89EE0E8E-C5C6-4772-A5EE-D347E40FB0E4}

EndProjectSection

EndProject

Project("{FAE04EC0-301F-11D3-BF4B-00C04F79EFBC}") = "HacksLib",

"HacksLib\HacksLib.csproj", "{89EE0E8E-C5C6-4772-A5EE-D347E40FB0E4}"

ProjectSection(ProjectDependencies) = postProject

EndProjectSection

EndProject

You can see that the syntax of the file is somewhat similar to Visual Basic.

Each project has a

Project and EndProject tag as well as a ProjectSection

tag to track the dependencies for the project. The first GUID in the project

tag is used to identify what type of project this is. In this instance, the

GUIDs for both a C# Windows Forms project and a C# library project are