Visual Studio does not let me drag drop items into it?

visual-studio-2010 file visual-studio-2012 drag-and-drop
Banshee picture Banshee · Mar 5, 2013 · Viewed 46.4k times · Source

Using Visual studio 2010 I got problems when double-clicking, for example a config file (*.config). Visual Studio would open but give me a error message about parameters. If I simple try to drag and drop a file that Visual Studio usually can read in to it, the icon will give me the "not possible icon"?

I have now installed Visual Studio 2012 and it has the same problem?!

This makes my work a lot harder, it should be easy to just drag & drop files into Visual Studio, but it's not so? Now I have to manually find the file with the file menu?

Please note, I have re-installed the computer before installing Visual Studio 2012.

Answer

user503386 picture user503386 · Mar 5, 2013

On Windows Vista and newer Windows Explorer runs with medium integrity level. If you run Visual Studio as administrator (high integrity level) then for security reasons OS will disable drag and drop from Explorer to Visual Studio.

You can either run Visual Studio as normal user or you can install VSCommands for Visual Studio 2012 extension. It has several features that can help with this such as:

  • Elevated Windows Explorer - small tool which looks like Windows Explorer but runs with elevated permissions allowing Drag And Drop
  • Directory Explorer - tool window inside Visual Studio which again looks like Windows Explorer and allows Drag And Drop
  • Run Visual Studio with medium integrity - allows Drag And Drop from Windows Explorer, but you won't be able to attach to processes run by other users (e.g. IIS)

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