September 2007 Archives

Visual Studio had been crashing on me when I attempted to get the latest code from TFS. A helpful developer (thanks, Steven!) tipped me off on a service pack for Visual Studio that would cure its ailment. However, he warned that it would take a whole day to install this service pack so it would be wise to wait until I didn't have any pressing deadlines before I fixed this problem.

Today I discovered why. After installing the service pack, I got the following error message when I attempted to open the solution I was working on:

The project file cannot be opened. The project type is not supported by this installation.

I Googled for a solution and came across some forum posts with promising suggestions.

I tried all the easy fixes first.

1. running

   devenv /setup

   at the Visual Studio Command Prompt


2. running

   devenv /ResetSkipPkgs

   at the Visual Studio Command Prompt


3. running

   regsvr32.exe "%vs80comntools%\..\IDE\projectaggregator.dll"



4. installing Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 - Update to Support Web Application Projects (KB915364)

But none of these tricks fixed my issue.

Finally I gave one last suggestion a try. I reinstalled Visual Studio 2005 Team Explorer - ENU Service Pack 1 and it worked like a charm. I can open my solution without any error messages once again. I'm hoping that Visual Studio won't crash when I update my local copy of the code. (So far I haven't seen any crashes yet.)

Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web discusses the discrimination that women in technology face.