A Trip to Know an Extension, mdproj

Assume that you just come across a file that ends with mdproj extension. How do you know which software generated it?

Well, I guess you probably go to a search engine and try out keywords such as “mdproj extension”. OK, so what is your conclusion from that? It is very likely that you answer is MonoDevelop generates such mdproj files. That’s somewhat a correct answer, as old releases of MonoDevelop does generate such files in its own format, before it fully supports MSBuild script format.

We should all be good at finding out the first best answer from search results, but what if I tell you “no, this file is not generated by MonoDevelop.” Then what can you do? To locate the second best answer is not that easy, right?

Interestingly that from the search results provided by Google, I can see that mdproj seems to be also related to Rational products from IBM. Thus, I try to grab the content of that file at this moment, and it looks like this,

"General" { "SccProjectName" = "\"$/BNT_AVM/CAT/SRC/Enhancement/CATApp/CATAnalysisProject\", BYRCAAAA" "SccLocalPath" = "." "SccAuxPath" = "" "SccProvider" = "MSSCCI:Microsoft Visual SourceSafe" "ProjectIdGuid" = "{F7615CCA-82F9-41F8-BB04-367601CCBE8A}" "ShowAllFiles" = "T" } "Configurations" {     "Debug|Win32"     {     }     "Release|Win32"     {     } } "Folders" { } "Files" {     "Model1.mdx"     {     "ProjRelPath" = "T"     } } "ProjStartupServices" { } "Globals" { }

Looks so weird, but we do get one more piece of critical information that this file refers to something named Model1.mdx (and this file is related to Visual Studio). Yes, this extra file extension might help us later.

A quick search on .mdx extension soon leads me to this page

Aha, clearly mdx extension is for UML models. So soon we can confirm from previous search results that mdproj extension is also used by Rational XDE for model projects. That explains why Visual Studio text appears in the mdproj file as well.

So this is the story about how I find out the relationship between Rational XDE and mdproj extension, while personally I have never used Rational XDE in the past.

For your reference, this post comes from a StackOverflow question, http://stackoverflow.com/questions/17732870/open-mdproj-file-in-vs2010/17800480#17800480