Where can I find the complete schemas for Visual Studio 2005 and 2008 project files?

Question

The only thing I could find so far were those two pages

• http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-US/library/y4sy8216(v=vs.80).aspx
• http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-US/library/y4sy8216(v=vs.90).aspx

Along with the respective "descriptions".

However, they are far from complete as is evidenced by the missing descriptions for elements underneath the Tool element.

So then I found the descriptions for VCProjectEngine in the VS installation folder:

C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\Common7\IDE\PublicAssemblies\Microsoft.VisualStudio.VCProjectEngine.xml

but it's unclear whether the names of the object properties is a 1:1 mapping to those inside the resulting .vcproj file?

Things appear to be a little more straightforward for newer VS versions (MSBuild based), but not completely.

Answer 1

There are none that describe the whole project file. The thing is that many tags work by convention, many tasks can be declared and named inline by simply calling out to the task assembly.

So even though for the basic structure a XSD exists, there is none that describes every possible way a project file can be setup not can you validate the project file without loading the tasks and have them validate their own snippets.