Tuesday, July 21, 2009

The project type is not supported in Visual Studio 2008

You download some source code demonstrating ASP.NET MVC, a library or an application built on this MVC framework, but when you open the .sln-file, you are greeted with the following error:

The project file ‘your-project.csproj’ cannot be opened.

The project type is not supported by this installation.

It’s wonderful, isn’t it, that this message tells us next to nothing? Which project type is unsupported? There’s no way to tell, as the Property Dialog for an unloaded project doesn’t tell us much.

The reason, it seems, is that the unsupported project is probably built against a different MVC version.

And the solution is to hack the project file:

  1. Right click and select ‘Edit …’.
  2. Replace the whole tag with the following:
    <ProjectTypeGuids>{603c0e0b-db56-11dc-be95-000d561079b0};{349c5851-65df-11da-9384-00065b846f21};{fae04ec0-301f-11d3-bf4b-00c04f79efbc}</ProjectTypeGuids>

Or, as in my case, download and install ASP.NET MVC :-(

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

life saving post, thanks!

Unknown said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Scot said...

I had to download and install ASP.NET MVC as well. Everything works now. Thank you for the tip.

Jollymugs said...

Perfect! thanks

Michael Wallis said...

I found this solution to work for me as well. However, I already had MVC 2 showing as installed on my machine.

Just to try it out, I uninstalled and re-installed with the download provided in this blog and it worked!

One other thing on this was I never recalled having to install MVC before so I cannot say how / when it was installed before.

Thanks!
Michael

Anonymous said...

I did both...WORKS GREAT:D Thanx

Anonymous said...

You rock!! I just did not remember that at all. Thanks.

Sandeep Mittal said...

Saved my life..Wow