What's the purpose of this string in my Visual Studio *.sln file?

Question

I am using a text editor to manually edit my *.sln file. I am confused about the following lines:

Project("{FAE04EC0-301F-11D3-BF4B-00C04F79EFBC}") = "Test2008", "ToolsTest2008Test2008Test2008.csproj", "{00B5EBB2-FDA5-4B23-BDC5-27E9F82E7C69}"
    ProjectSection(ProjectDependencies) = postProject
        {82B9BEC0-C9CC-4423-B54F-61E3C4AF53D8} = {82B9BEC0-C9CC-4423-B54F-61E3C4AF53D8}
    EndProjectSection
EndProject

What's the point of this

{82B9BEC0-C9CC-4423-B54F-61E3C4AF53D8} = {82B9BEC0-C9CC-4423-B54F-61E3C4AF53D8}

statement? It looks totally superfluous.

question from:https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5629981/whats-the-purpose-of-this-string-in-my-visual-studio-sln-file

Answer 1

The {82B9BEC0-C9CC-4423-B54F-61E3C4AF53D8} = {82B9BEC0-C9CC-4423-B54F-61E3C4AF53D8} line indicates that the Test2008 project has a declared dependency (set up via the Project Dependencies dialog in VStudio) on the project with the unique identifier 82B9BEC0-C9CC-4423-B54F-61E3C4AF53D8. You should be able to find a project with that same identifier in the same .sln file.

As for why the odd syntax of the line, I have no insider knowledge of the .sln file format. However, based on observation of other ProjectSection extracts in .sln files, I would have to guess that the .sln parser used by Visual Studio historically assumed that the ProjectSection lines will be in a key = value format, with key uniqueness enforced within any given section. I would also guess that the folks who implemented the project dependency functionality decided that, rather than mucking with the parser, it would be simpler to use projectId = projectId for their section lines since the keys are meaningless to them, but they are guaranteed to be unique if only one dependency from project A to project B is otherwise enforced.