You’ve may have noticed that sometimes your project name is too long where other times it is accepted in the New Project Dialog.  As explained by Paul on the Visual Studio General Forums…

The OS limit is 260 characters (MAX_PATH).  However, the computation is:

  Path length + 1 (separator) +
   Solution name length + 1 (separator) +
   Project name length + 1 (separator) +
   Project name length +
   80 (Reserved space)

The project name length is added twice: Once for the folder name and once for the file that holds your project itself (.vbproj, .csproj etc.). The 80 additional reserved characters are for the files that you place in the project. Most new project templates create several sub-folders for intermediate files that help with like intellisense and debugging. While we may not use the full 80 characters, it is a sensible limit.

Using Paul’s calculation above, let’s create a Max-Length project / solution named
ThisSolutionIsThirtyFiveCharacters  (35 characters long)
at location
C:\Documents and Settings\saraf\My Documents\Visual Studio 2005\Projects  (73 characters long)

Doing the math, we get
73 + 1 +
35 + 1 +
35 + 1 +
35 +
80
= 261

So, VS will accept creating a solution / project ThisSolutionIsThirtyFiveCharacters at C:\Documents and Settings\saraf\My Documents\Visual Studio 2005\Projects. 

For those of you who used the VSEdit Powertoy for VS 2003, you’ll be happy to know that you can have similar behavior in VS 2005!

Just run “devenv.exe /edit <filename>” from the command line to open any file in an existing instance of Visual Studio 2005.

You may want to create a VSEdit command if you find yourself using this feature a lot.  Just create a file called "VSEdit.cmd" (you can use notepad to do this) with the following:

@"%Program Files%\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\Common7\IDE\devenv.exe" /edit %*

Also, place VSEdit.cmd in a directory that’s in your PATH (or add the directory to your PATH).

now you can do
vsedit <filename>