BootstrapPackage did not load correctly VS 2010

Question

I just installed VS 2010 v 10.0.30319.1 RTMRel on 64bit Win7 Ultimate and keep receiving the following error when I try to open a web project. I have repaired and reinstall but the issue persists. I am looking for resolution suggestions. Thanks

The 'Microsoft.Data.Entity.Design.BootstrapPackage.BootstrapPackage, Microsoft.Data.Design.BootstrapPackager, Version 10.0.0.0.... did not load correctly.

Answer 1

This was happening to me as well. In my case I installed Visual Studio on my D drive which is not my system drive. After reading a link found in ChiliYago's blog post I found that the root cause was that files were missing from %ProgramFiles%\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\Common7\IDE (Which is what the error message says).

In my case, the missing files were installed in C:\ProgramFiles (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\Common7\IDE and not D:\ProgramFiles (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\Common7\IDE. My solution was to copy the missing .dlls from the install directory on the C drive to the install directory on the D drive, and the error stopped happening.

I had previously installed an Express edition of C# and un-installed it before adding Visual Studio 2010, this may have contributed to the problem for me.

Answer 2

In my case, I Installed Entity Framework June 2011 and then uninstalled it. After this I had this problem.

Nothing found in internet worked and when I was going to format I found in the directory: C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\Common7\IDE\CommonExtensions\ these 2 files:

Microsoft.Data.Entity.Design.BootstrapPackage.pkgdef

Microsoft.Data.Entity.Design.Package.pkgdef

Here is when VS 2010 is trying to load the library that cannot load.

I have another PC with Entity Framework 4.0, and it doesnt have these files, so I have moved them out to the desktop. Now Visual Studio is loading the project succesfully.

On the other hand, my problem also was that If I choose to hide the error message then Entity Framework 4.0 didn't create the .Designer.cs of the Model. then when I tried to add the Domain Service Class to the project, the context class didnt appear (but yes in another machine with the same project and same database).

Now that I have not the error message everything looks working good.

I hope it helps others because I have had this problem during weeks.

Best Regards,