Can't load project after pulling: "Expected 'ENCODING' but found 'utf-8'."

Question

After pulling the project (WPF application) from git,

I get this error:

What could be causing it? It worked fine before pulling it (someone else commited on the project).

Answer 1

It appears there were some unclosed tags in my .csproject file.

Strangely though, the error above was reported instead.

Answer 2

Look at your .csproj extension file search for: <<<<<< or ====== or >>>>>>>> and remove it.

also check your web.config file for those symbols and remove them too if they exist there.