How do I open an old MVC project in Visual Studio 2012 or Visual Studio 2013?

Question

Opening an unsupported MVC project in Visual Studio 2012 or Visual Studio 2013 is actually pretty easy to accomplish with two steps. In fact, as bytebender’s comment indicates, these same steps should apply to and work for MVC 1 projects. However, I haven’t tested them and therefore cannot guarantee that they do in fact work.

Assuming that you have not already done so step one is to download and install MVC 1, MVC 2 or MVC 3 (close Visual Studio before starting the installation).

Once you have the appropriate flavor of MVC installed the project will still not load in VS 2012. This is because ASP.NET MVC projects are a project subtype of the Web Application project type. This means that the project has additional add ins and features available to it when used within Visual Studio.

Both Visual Studio 2012 and Visual Studio 2013 are limited in their backwards compatibility with ASP.NET MVC and other project types. Unfortunately, installing the old MVC bits did not change that. Visual Studio 2012 is compatible with the ASP.NET MVC 3 and 4 project flavors. Visual Studio 2013 is compatible with MVC 4 and MVC 5.

To get the project to load you will have to modify the project file. To do so right click on the unloaded project and select Edit. Which will open the project file as an XML text file. Find the ProjectTypeGuids node which should look something like this:

<ProjectTypeGuids>
    {F85E285D-A4E0-4152-9332-AB1D724D3325};{349c5851-65df-11da-9384-00065b846f21};{fae04ec0-301f-11d3-bf4b-00c04f79efbc}
</ProjectTypeGuids>

Remove the appropriate Project Guid from the list:

• ASP.NET MVC 1: {603c0e0b-db56-11dc-be95-000d561079b0}
• ASP.NET MVC 2: {F85E285D-A4E0-4152-9332-AB1D724D3325} (shown in example above)
• ASP.NET MVC 3: {E53F8FEA-EAE0-44A6-8774-FFD645390401}
• ASP.NET MVC 4: {E3E379DF-F4C6-4180-9B81-6769533ABE47}

With the appropriate GUID removed the ProjectTypeGuids should look similar to this:

<ProjectTypeGuids>
    {349c5851-65df-11da-9384-00065b846f21};{fae04ec0-301f-11d3-bf4b-00c04f79efbc}
</ProjectTypeGuids>

Save the file and close the Visual Studio project file editor. Right click the project and select reload. If the project does not reload close and reopen Visual Studio. You should now be able to work with your old ASP.NET MVC project in your new version of Visual Studio.

One important thing to note is that after these modifications Visual Studio is not aware that this is an ASP.NET MVC project; therefore the project-specific features like "Add Controller, View etc." will not be present in menus.

I used @ahsteele's approach (thanks and 2x+1s!), but was having one further error:-

.csproj : error : The operation could not be completed. Invalid class string

I can't find any citations for the real cause of that, but I was able to get VS2012RTM to load the project successfully by changing the <ProjectGuid>. (No idea how this happened - its part of a large solution and VS08, VS10, VS11 Beta and VS2012RC have all upgraded the .csproj and .sln over time.

In VS2017 the solution is to just make it like <ProjectTypeGuids></ProjectTypeGuids> so.

No Spaces in between ladies and gentlemen, otherwise it will waste 48 hours of your time.

Regards