CODEWITHSUNDEEP
xmlvisual-studiofilesolution
vik santata
vik santata

Reputation: 3109

Visual Studio: What is the format of "*.sln" file? It's not xml

I used text editor to open an .sln file, it looks like a tree structure, but it's not xml format.

Do you know what format it is, and can we process it using C#, like processing xml conveniently?

Upvotes: 13

Views: 9056

Answers (3)

Yola
Yola

Reputation: 19019

Add Microsoft.Build from NuGet and then:

using Microsoft.Build.Construction;
var sln = SolutionFile.Parse(filename);

Upvotes: 3

TarmoPikaro
TarmoPikaro

Reputation: 5223

Take a look at:

https://github.com/tapika/syncProj

Solution.LoadSolution will decrypt solution information for you in code.

Upvotes: 1

astef
astef

Reputation: 9478

Here is the description of the format: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb165951(v=vs.140).aspx

You're right, it is not XML, but another text-based format:

The .sln file contains text-based information the environment uses to find and load the name-value parameters for the persisted data and the project VSPackages it references.

And for parsing the file you can look at this question: Parsing Visual Studio Solution files

Upvotes: 13

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