title: Visual Studio opening .xml files in Notepad
body: <p>So I'm happily working on a project making heavy use of custom .xml configuration files this morning.</p>
  
  <p>All of a sudden, whenever I double-click an .xml file in Solution Explorer, it opens in Notepad instead of within Visual Studio.</p>
  
  <p>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.</p>
  
  <p>But the problem remains -- now when I open a file from Explorer, Visual Studio Opens, <em>then</em> it opens Notepad.</p>
  
  <p>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?</p>
  
  <p>Notes:</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>This only happens for .xml files. Other text files (.config, .txt) open within Visual Studio just fine.</li>
  <li>This has nothing to do with <em>Windows</em> file associations, as Windows open up VS2008 just as it should. This is some crazy problem internal to Visual Studio.</li>
  <li>I've also tried Tools >> Options >> General >> Restore File Associations. No luck.</li>
  <li>Nothing present in Tools >> Options >> Text Editor >> File Extension</li>
  <li>This is what my "Open With" menu looks like for .xml files. As you can see, "XML Editor" is set to the default.
  <a href="https://i.stack.imgur.com/ilTUz.png" rel="nofollow noreferrer"><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/ilTUz.png" alt="alt text"></a>
  </li>
  </ul>