Visual Studio Cannot Open File

Question

I'm working on my first project in Visual Studio and I haven't used Windows much since '05, so please bear with me.

I've got my project open in Visual Studio 2008, and I'm trying to open a particular file for editing, but I get an error that says

"c:\path\to\file
Cannot open file.

I've verified that the file exists, and I can open it from Windows Explorer, but nothing from inside Visual Studio, any ideas?

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I'm not familiar with Visual Studio, so my terminology might be incorrect.

The file appears in the tree in the Visual Studio Explorer pane, so I double clicked it, and got the error. The error said nothing more than the file path: Cannot open file.

How can I check permissions/ACLs in Windows? I assumed that since I could open it in Windows Explorer, I would be able to open it in Visual Studio.

And it's a .cpp file.

Answer 1

You may want to right-click on the file in the tree, and delete it from the project.

Then, add back an existing item.

Hopefully that will fix the problem.

Answer 2

Though I'm not familiar with this specifically, if you just want to move forward, I'd recommend creating a new project type and just adding all the existing files to it. Should be quicker and easier than diagnosing what could be many issues.

Other things to check: encoding type of the project file, permissions/ACLs (can you open that actual file from an unelevated VS prompt, for instance), etc.