Opening Visual Studio 2003 Solution files with SlickEdit 2011

[bloudraak]

Hello,

Every now and then I'm required to look at code that was written as long as 5 to 10 years ago.  For projects that were written in Visual Studio 2008 or later, I simply open the solution in SlickEdit and I'm able to navigate around the source.  This is great, because I can look at solutions even on my Mac, saving me from having to fire up a Windows VM and open it in Visual Studio 2010 (which has its own problems with older solutions).

However, I'm unable to open Visual Studio 2003 solutions using SlickEdit 2011 for Mac (16.1.0.9). It just opens the file as if it was a text file.

I can use the SlickEdit 2011 for Windows to open the file. It shows the project and then consumes 100% CPU and never stops.  Before this happens, the status bar states that a VTG file doesn't exist and its rebuilding it. 

One thing to note is that it is likely that these projects were .NET 1.x based and that the framework is not available on either Windows or Mac.   SlickEdit is indispensable when working with legacy code even if the tools and platform on which that code was written is no longer available.  There isn't an alternative available that I know of.   

Is there a possibility the Mac version can support opening legacy Visual Studio solution files? Is there something I can do to prevent the Windows version from consuming 100% when opening legacy Visual Studio solution files?

The projects are confidential, so it may not be possible for me to send you the whole solution and its supporting projects.

Werner

[Matthew]

Does the project have a .sln file? Or is it using the older-style .dsp/.dsw project format? (I'm pretty sure VS2003 used .sln, but it's been a while...) You don't need to have the VS.net frameworks available to be able to open the project.

I dug around some of our older example projects, and was able to open (what I think is) a VS 2003 solution on the Mac using 16.1.0.9. Go to the Project > Open Other Workspace > Visual Studio .NET Solution menu item, and browse for the .sln file.

For reference, the top of the .sln file I tested looks like the following. Let me know if your "Format Version" is different than 8.00.

Code: [Select]

Microsoft Visual Studio Solution File, Format Version 8.00
Project("{8BC9CEB8-8B4A-11D0-8D11-00A0C91BC942}") = "cpp", "vcpp7.vcproj", "{971A048E-A4BB-431D-9A0D-D58FD4DF09EC}"
ProjectSection(ProjectDependencies) = postProject
EndProjectSection
EndProject
As for the 100% CPU usage, you may have run into a case where one of the SlickEdit  helper files is damaged or incompatible with the version of SE you're using. Remove the .vtg (tag database) and .vpwhist (history) files. You may also want to delete the .vpw (workspace) and .vpj (project) files as well, since SE will recreate them as needed when opening a 3rd party project/workspace type.

[bloudraak]

Thanks mate. Opening the solution through SlickEdit menu seems to do the trick on OS X.  I was trying to open it by associating the sln extension with SlickEdit and using Finder's Open With feature. It seems that if one does it that way, SlickEdit for Mac sees it as a simple text file. The same happens to Visual Studio 2005 files too. 

Any chance the mac version can support opening solution files using a association or Finder's Open With feature?

[bloudraak]

Now that I managed to open the solution in SlickEdit, I'm seeing something really odd.  See attached screenshot. The projects are organized in Solution Folders. SlickEdit shows all the folders at the top and projects and the bottom. When you toggle the folders (except for the "Solution Items" one) nothing happens.

[Matthew]

This problem with the Visual Studio organizational (virtual) folders has been around for a while. We do support the Solution Items folder, but not the other virtual folders. The SlickEdit project/workspace code has some long-standing assumptions that only allow for project nodes to appear below workspace nodes. We only really have one "model" for this, and some 3rd party project conventions suffer from a square peg/round hole problem.
A rewrite of our 3rd party project support is on the horizon, but you're not going to see that in a shipping product until 2013.

And yes, we can add .sln to be opened as workspace instead of text on the Mac when using Finder. That change will be in SE2012 later this year.