Opening existing project in Visual Studio 2010

Question

All,

I have a project that was originally written in vs 2005 or earlier (don't remember bc I didn't write it). I opened it in vs2008 and converted it although it still has the csproj file. sln file states:

Microsoft Visual Studio Solution File, Format Version 10.00

Visual Studio 2008

Project("{FAE04EC0-301F-11D3-BF4B-00C04F79EFBC}") = "foo", "foo.csproj", "{BF9BAC88-C507-404D-928C-BC08193F5CCD}" EndProject

I have worked with the project many times in vs2008 without any problem.

Now I am running vs2010 on a virtual machine and want to open this project in it. However, when I try I get the "cannot be opened because its project type .csproj is not supported by this version of the application" error. Main solution files are foo.sln, foo.csproj, and foo.csproj.user (in addition to code files). I am somewhat confused as I thought using it in vs2008 (and going through the initial conversion) would make the jump to vs2010 painless.

What am I missing? All my searches end up with the same few posts about converting projects in 2008.

Thanks!

Answer 1

This is a bug in Visual Studio 2010. I pointed it out to Microsoft when testing VS2010Beta and they first said they couldn't repeat it and then when I told them how easy it is to repeat they said that it isn't important.

It is easy to get around it. Open VS2010 first, browse to the project, open it. VS2010 then does the usual asking if you want to convert it and say yes and it succeeds.

---

Archives downloaded from the internet may have to be "Unblocked" first. VS2010 continued to have this problem with a source tree until I "Unblocked" the originating archive and re-extracted its contents into a recreated directory.

Answer 2

Open up Visual Studio and check that your installation genuinely contains the C# components. I believe you'd see this error if you had (say) Visual Basic Express installed, but not Visual C# Express.