Visual Studio opening .xml files in Notepad

So I'm happily working on a project making heavy use of custom .xml configuration files this morning.

All of a sudden, whenever I double-click an .xml file in Solution Explorer, it opens in N开发者_运维知识库otepad instead of within Visual Studio.

Thinking that it was the Windows file associations, I right-clicked on a file in Explorer, selected Open With >> Choose Defaults, and selected Visual Studio 2008.

But the problem remains -- now when I open a file from Explorer, Visual Studio Opens, then it opens Notepad.

Needless to say, this is very frustrating, and Google is not much help. Has anyone else ever had this problem, and what did you do about it?

Notes:

• This only happens for .xml files. Other text files (.config, .txt) open within Visual Studio just fine.
• This has nothing to do with Windows file associations, as Windows open up VS2008 just as it should. This is some crazy problem internal to Visual Studio.
• I've also tried Tools >> Options >> General >> Restore File Associations. No luck.
• Nothing present in Tools >> Options >> Text Editor >> File Extension
• This is what my "Open With" menu looks like for .xml files. As you can see, "XML Editor" is set to the default.

  

Yes. Visual Studio Text Editor appears not to be able to support UTF-16 Unicode and so opens it up in an external editor. Resave the xml file with "UTF-8" encoding (remember to change your xml declaration from "UTF-16" to "UTF-8" too and then it should be fine.

If you go into Tools > Options > Text Editor > File Extension, do you have anything in here that is mapped to notepad? If so remove that and it should clear it up. Also, if you have an XML file in a project, you can right click on it, choose Open With and choose your default editor there.

Update: see comments for other things to try

Had the same problem. Try opening the file with XML Editor with Encoding. That way I could explicitly choose Unicode, which successfully opened the file in VS. After saving the file from there the problems went away.

I had similar problem with .txt files. I tried to open that file from VS using "Open with..." and VS opened it, but showed garbage for every second character. The problem went away when I saved the file to a different codepage. Though it is still a bit strange, since a copy of that original file in original codepage did open in VS with double-click correctly and and showed also correctly.

I think "showing garbage for every second character" is due to that file being saved as unicode, but treated as non unicode in the editor

I had a similar situation with *.js files using VS Express 2012 for Windows Desktop after an upgrade had been installed. Running:

rmdir /s /q  %LOCALAPPDATA%\Microsoft\WDExpress\11.0\ComponentModelCache

and restarting VS resolved the issue.