My dev box recently decided that all USB devices - along with several other pieces of hardware - were inherently evil and in the end I decided to just repave the machine. It has been about 6 or so months since I first moved to Vista and it was time for a fresh install anyhow.
After reinstalling and configuring my box I sat to do some real work (hey, I gotta' pay that mortgage). So I fired up Visual Studio and got busy. I work primarily on web applications and I have a few browsers installed on my box for testing with Firefox is my browser of choice.
I quickly noticed that launching a page in my browser via the VS debug menu, shortcut keys (F5 or Ctrl+F5), and even the right-click "View in Browser" context item would open the file in Firefox. That made sense since it was my system’s default browser. However before the repave those commands would launch the page in IE... what gives?
Ask Jon!
I turned to my new human driven search engine for an answer:
Me: Jon, how do I tell Visual Studio that I want to launch files using IE rather than my system’s default browser?
Jon: Hmm... I think there is a setting for that in the Tools -> Options menu somewhere. Let me look.
... waiting...
Jon: I’m not sure. I know you can do it but I can’t find it.
Me: OK, well no worries... I’ll figure it out later.
Rather than give up and resort to Google I decided to look around the various IDE menus for myself. Bah! to the 4-Hour Workweek. :)
The Answer
As it turns out setting this is quite simple.
- Open a WebForm file in VS (anything ending in
.aspx will do) - Select the "Browse With..." option from the File menu
- Select your preferred browser from the list and click the "Set as Default" button
Now opening, browsing, or debugging a WebForm from within Visual studio will open the file in the specified browser (IE in my case) rather than my system default.