Best practices for editing sln, proj, suo files?

Question

In .NET, there are SUO, SLN, Proj files for every solution/project. Whilst I know what these files are, is it wise to edit them by hand? Do they ever even need to be edited? If so, what is the best way?

Thanks

Answer 1

You can edit many of the files available. There are even instructions for doing it in the documentation http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms171487(v=VS.90).aspx

Solution files are NOT in XML format and you can find information on the content of .SLN files here: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb165951(v=vs.140).aspx

Project files are MSBuild scripts so they are frequently edited (either with a tool or manually) to include items that modify the build configuration to meet your needs. Here is a link to the MSBuild reference that may help: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/0k6kkbsd.aspx

.SUO files are your user options and shouldn't be edited directly. I have personally used the binary editor and edited it just to see if it can be done with success but you do so at your own risk.

Answer 2

The project files can easily be edited by hand - you have to do it sometimes to add items to the project that MSBuild supports but Visual Studio does not support the editing of (such as conditional elements). I have an add-in for Visual Studio (I think it might be PowerCommands) that adds an "Edit project file" option to the context menu in Solution Explorer. Clicking it unloads the project from Visual Studio and opens the prof file as XML to be edited in Visual Studio's XML editor.

The SLN files are not XML, but they do not really contain anything that would be worth editing by hand.

I think the SUO files are binary and shouldn't be edited (they only contain user-specific values for the solution).