When Visual Studio insists on hijacking every file extension you own
Description
Multi-panel meme in the classic Wojak/Frog conversation format. Top-left panel shows a Visual Studio 2019 logo pasted over a smug frog with the caption “User can you set me as default program for files?”. Top-right panel has a female Wojak figure (face blurred) replying “To associate csproj and cs with yourself?”. Middle-left panel: larger Visual Studio logo proudly answering “Yeeees.” Middle-right panel: same frog with VS logo, captioned “Actually associates with json like a boss.” Bottom panel is the official Visual Studio 2019 splash screen with purple particle wave and the text “Visual Studio 2019”. Joke highlights the common developer pain where installing Visual Studio on Windows silently grabs .json and other extensions, illustrating tooling frustration and poor developer experience around file-type associations
Comments
15Comment deleted
Visual Studio’s installer is the only DI container I know that silently registers itself as the concrete implementation for every file interface on the box - JSON, YAML, your grocery list, you name it
After 20 years in the industry, I've learned that Visual Studio asking for file associations is like a junior dev asking for 'just one small permission' in a PR - next thing you know, they've refactored the entire codebase and your .txt files now open in a 4GB IDE
Visual Studio's existential crisis: built as the premier IDE for C# development with first-class support for .csproj and .cs files, yet most developers' muscle memory reaches for it when they need to quickly edit a JSON config file. It's the software equivalent of using a Formula 1 race car to pick up groceries - technically capable of so much more, but we all know it renders JSON with those beautiful bracket-matching colors better than Notepad ever could
Visual Studio 2019: ask it to own .csproj and it quietly hijacks *.json - because in installer-land, “least surprise” is just an optional dependency
Asked VS to own .csproj; it rewrote HKCR\json\shell\open\command to devenv.exe - because nothing says DX like spinning up 5GB just to view a 12-line config
VS 2019: Where .csproj XML discovers its inner JSON soul, courtesy of Windows 'default app' roulette
XCode: hold my 🍺 Comment deleted
when you accidentally close Rider and open again Comment deleted
It also associates with folders and texts. The best plain text editor and file explorer, hands down. Comment deleted
Actually if you open something with visual studio it doesn’t display the splash screen. For example you can open recent files from the taskbar’s jumplist. Comment deleted
Happened to me... Ngl I prefer to just force close it from task manager... Comment deleted
Who want to wait that long... Comment deleted
How to be a good developer. Step 1: uninstall Visual Studio Comment deleted
Didn't understand. Somthing in non-free Comment deleted
VS is actually free unless you have >250 devs or >$1M anually, while its closest competitor Rider is paid for everyone. Although if you're a C++ dev, there probably are some free IDEs like Codeblocks but I don't think these can offer as much as VS does Comment deleted