Visual Studio opening .xml files in Notepad

Question

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 Notepad 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.

Answer 1

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.