Visual Studio Tools for Git, Page not found, visual studio 2013.1

Question

I just encountered a strange error in the vs tools for git extension, when pressing changes I get the following error:

Page 'b38f4abc-2b2c-4e4d-a047-eaaca7514610' not found.

I've encountered this page on ms: http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/abafc7d6-dcaa-40f4-8a5e-d6724bdb980c/view/Discussions

They state that the only solution for fixing the problem is to reinstall 2013!

Anyone got any bright ideas how to fix this without a complete reinstall?

Answer 1

I got the same issue today, and found the same page you refer to.

On page 2, "Jameson M [MSFT]" replies that you can try the following:

If you get into this state, the first thing I would try is to run 'devenv /setup' from the visual studio command prompt as an admin. This will force Visual Studio to rebuild the various caches for finding these pages

I did exactly that, and thereafter it worked without having to re-install VS etc.

Just remember to run it as admin (I forgot the first time :-))

PS. You can typically find the VS Developer Command Prompt here:

"%ProgramFiles(x86)%\Microsoft Visual Studio 12.0\Common7\Tools\Shortcuts\"

Answer 2

I ran into this today, and found that I was able to fix it with my favourite "Make Visual Studio 2013 work again" trick, which is a bit less severe than the /setup flag. Find this folder:

C:\Users\YOUR USERNAME HERE\AppData\Local\Microsoft\VisualStudio\12.0

In there you will find a folder called ComponentModelCache. This sometimes gets in a corrupted state that can cause all sorts of weird failures. (And by 'sometimes', I mean about once a week ever since I installed Update 4.)

This seems to be a folder that Visual Studio can happily rebuild from scratch as required (as the 'cache' name implies). So, make sure you don't have any instances of Visual Studio running, and then just delete that folder. (If you're feeling paranoid, move it somewhere else instead of deleting it, so that you can put it back; I've never had to do that.)

NOTE: just delete ComponentModelCache, and not the whole 12.0 folder!

Now run Visual Studio again. Everything will probably be a bit slow while it repopulates that cache, but after this, various problems may go away. The error described in this question went away, and VS's git support started working properly again, after it had been doing various bizarre things (like being unable to work out which branch I was on).