Restore File Associations in Visual Studio 2010

If you have both Visual Studio 2008 and Visual Studio 2010 installed on your machine, and you uninstall one of them, you loose the file associations for Visual Studio.

To restore the File associations back, follow these steps:

Open Visual Studio > Go to Tools > Options. When the Options dialog opens, looks at the lower left corner for a ‘Show all Settings’ checkbox.

Select this checkbox > Go to General Page of Environment and click the ‘Restore File Associations’ button. Click OK when done.

Here’s a screenshot

Your file associations should be restored now.

About The Author

Suprotim Agarwal, Developer Technologies MVP (Microsoft Most Valuable Professional) is the founder and contributor for DevCurry, DotNetCurry and SQLServerCurry. He is the Chief Editor of a Developer Magazine called DNC Magazine. He has also authored two Books - 51 Recipes using jQuery with ASP.NET Controls. and The Absolutely Awesome jQuery CookBook.

Follow him on twitter @suprotimagarwal.

2 comments:

Unknown said...: In my version of VS2010, the "Show all settings" checkbox was not there, but I _was_ still able to click the "Restore file associations" button and have it work.; July 20, 2010 at 8:59 AM
Blake Facey said...: Worked great for me. In Windows 7 I had to run Visual Studio 2010 as an administrator (Right-click VS2010 icon and select run as administrator) to be able to restore the default settings. YMMV depending on how your machine and network permissions are setup.; April 13, 2011 at 9:55 AM