The recent projects/files lists on the File menu in Visual Studio do not update when using the special "Open Arduino Project" menu item(s).

The menu items are to make it easy for new users to find sketches but do not need to be used.

You can use the normal Visual Studio menu items to open existing sketches which will then appear correctly in the recent lists.

Current and previous versions of Visual Micro have the following functionality/options:-

1) File>Open>Existing File - Use this option to open a pde/ino or project. If the current solution is empty then Visual Micro will prompt you to create a new project if one does not exist. If a project does exist it will be opened instead of the pde/ino. The pde/ino will be available, as with all sketch files, within the project that opens.

2) File>Open Project or Solution. This is the normal way to open existing Visual Studio projects or solutions. Visual Micro will detect if an Arduino project is being opened and ensure that the project structure matches the structure of the sketch being opened. This allows for the fact that a sketch might have been edited in another editor since it was last opened in Visual Studio.