When I was using Visual Studio .NET 2002 and 2003 a lot, I spent a lot of time in Notepad tweaking project and solution files. Well, in Visual Studio 2005, Microsoft has made editing project files much easier. The reason for doing this is pretty straightforward. The uses for project files has changed. Yes, the main purpose is to maintain which files are part of the project, but it also doubles as an MSBuild file, and you have to have an easy way to edit those files.?

To make that possible, Microsoft allows you to edit it right in Visual Studio 2005. Nice, but not necessarily obvious, but it's there - you have to unload the project, and then you can edit the file, and once you're done, you can reload it.

Now if just there was a nice, simple way to edit solution files...

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