Not sure if this is a general issue, but in case someone else runs into this it took me a bit to figure out since the info is a bit outdated on forum posts I googled. I installed Unreal 5.8 on a fresh Win 11 with VS 2026. I didn’t have previous unreal versions installed. For some reason, the .uproject extension was associated with Visual studio and not Unreal and VS complained it couldn’t find unreal. I tried uninstalling and reinstalling UE 5.8 and it still didn’t associate the file types.
How to fix:
- Copy the UnrealVersionSelector.exe
FROM the Epic games launcher folder (for me this was C:\Program Files (x86)\Epic Games\Launcher\Engine\Binaries\Win64\UnrealVersionSelector.exe)
TO the unreal engine folder C:\Program Files\Epic Games\UE_5.8\Engine\Binaries\Win64
-
Next open a command prompt as an admin (in start type cmd, right click command prompt, and run as administrator)
-
Now change directory (cd) to
C:\Program Files\Epic Games\UE_5.8\Engine\Binaries\Win64and then type “UnrealVersionSelector /fileassociations” to run it with the parameter to associate files -
then just Run
UnrealVersionSelectorwithout any parameters and it will open a prompt asking you “Register this directory as an Unreal Engine installation?” and hit yes. This should fix everything.