What does the number on the visual studio solution icon represent?

Question

Just out of curiosity - what does the number represent? At first I thought it was simply the version/year, because I saw some 10's and some 8's (I have vs 2010 and 2008) but, then why do I have some 9's aswell?

Solution 1

The numbers correspond to the internal version numbers of various editions of Visual Studio

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Visual_Studio#History

Visual Studio 6.0 (1998)
Visual Studio .NET (2002) = version 7
Visual Studio .NET 2003 = version 7.1
Visual Studio 2005 = version 8
Visual Studio 2008 = version 9
Visual Studio 2010 = version 10
Visual Studio 2012 = version 11
Visual Studio 2013 = version 12
Visual Studio 2015 = version 14
Visual Studio 2017 = version 15
Visual Studio 2019 = version 16

The number on the icon indicates the version that the project or solution is compatible with.

Solution 2

It's what version of Visual Studio the solution was created with. 10 is for Visual Studio 2010, 9 is for Visual Studio 2008, 8 was for 2005, and 7 was for 2003. You might seen an 8 sometimes with VS 2008 if you set it to target .Net 2.0 features only, but that usually means you found an older solution file somewhere.

Comments

[xdumaine]

+1 for mention of the .NET target for 2008 - That's good to know!

[xdumaine]

Great, I guess it never occurred to me that the versions were not simply the years, but it makes sense! (This made me think of how Windows 7 is actually windows version 6.1)

[Joel Coehoorn]

@roviuser - Note that it doesn't happen by default. In fact, I think it's a bug when it happens. VS2008 solutions that target .Net 2.0 should still use the VS9 format solution file.

[awe]

Why did the last one skip 13?

[Dheeraj Vepakomma]

@awe Because Microsoft is superstitious?

[awe]

No, because they don't want to risk losing customers that are...

[Davos]

MS SQL Server 2016 is version 13, so they aren't consistent about the superstition if that's the real reason. Or at least, it's just the VS team that is

[Ryan Beesley]

@Davos, Office skipped version 13 too.

[Arturs Radionovs]

Where does this icon come from? How does Windows find it? When I create a shortcut to a sln, it uses the same icon but when I pin that shortcut to the start menu, it loses the icon and uses the default blank page icon so I'm trying to find the sln icon to manually assign it to the shortcut.

[Arturs Radionovs]

I think I found it: C:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\microsoft shared\MSEnv\VSFileHandler.dll. That .dll is associated with the CLSID {9A2B23E4-2A50-48DB-B3C3-F5EA12947CB8} in the registry.