Go To Definition Cannot navigate to the symbol under the caret

Question

I suddenly started experiencing a problem today in my project where clicking Go To Definition gives me a strange error   Cannot navigate to the symbol under the caret      I first noticed it some time after installing Costura Fody via NuGet  I ve since uninstalled it but the problem persists  I ve cleaned and rebuilt the solution multiple times  There are no instances of  Fody  or  Costura  anywhere in my git commit history  before or after the point in time when this started happening  so I m thinking that one of my  gitignore d files is stuck in a bad state   The problem only occurs if the definition being targeted is in another file  Go To Definition for something in the currently opened file works fine  Peek Definition works fine too  Other solutions projects work fine as well -- it s only this one that s causing issues   I m using Visual Studio 2015  The issue doesn t seem to occur in the 2013 version   Why does this error occur and how can I fix it

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After doing a  devenv exe  resetuserdata   my VAssistX fails  so  actually  this reminds me that VAssistX can resolve the problem by Goto Implementation  Alt G

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Most of the paths submitted by others either don t work or are a little backwards   Empty this folder    localappdata  Temp TFSTemp   This worked for me

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Close visual studio then remove the hidden file name  vs on that project and open again the visual studio then build the project  Boom  All good

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After I read that this particular issue was fixed in the roslyn compiler  see this issue at GitHub   I updated Visual Studio from version 15 0 x to 15 3 1  It works like a charm now

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This weird bug happened to me while importing a Xamarin project into VS15  None of the solutions listed here worked for me  After a day of frustration I also ran into a problem similar to this  Visual Studio  quot Find quot  results in  quot No files were found to look in  Find stopped progress  quot   When clicking  find all  in the search dialog  a popup informed me that other files could not be searched through  so i figured the reason  go to definition  didn t work was due to the same bug  as looking for definitions in the same file did work   the weird solution in the above link  pressing Ctrl Scroll Lock or Ctrl Break a few times  solved both problems for me   Coloring of the code  which wasn t working when the  Go to definition  functionality was broken  also immediately returned

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I also faced with the same problem and  Find all references  for selected class has solved this issue

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My problem was that I  semi-accidentally  changed the property Build action of the problematic  cs file to Content  Changing it back to Compile did the trick  which makes sense

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The last couple of days I ve been getting this error  at least twice a day   really annoying  None of the solutions proposed here has worked for me  What I found  and since it was pretty difficult to find I m writing it down here  was to    Close Visual Open Console and navigate to Visual installation folder  in my computer is C  Program Files  x86  Microsoft Visual Studio 14 0 Common7 IDE run devenv exe  resetuserdata Open Visual Studio  it s going to take some time to load    Disclaimer  I m using Xamarin  TAKE INTO CONSIDERATION WHAT  OzSolomon and  xCasper HAVE SAID    OzSolomon     Know that this will reset many of your IDE customization  including   installed plugins  Make sure you re comfortable with that before using    resetuserdata    xCasper     If you have your settings synced through Microsoft  however  most of   the preferences seem to restore themselves  I say most because it   seems my keybindings did not restore and are back to being default    Everything else  such as my selected theme and colorization choices    the layout of my IDE  where I have tabs for instance   and what not   seem to of come back

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Recently upgraded to VS 2017 15 5 0 and came across this problem  I tried    Deleting the symbol cache Deleting my  vs folder  Rebuilding solution  Running devenv  resetuserdata   Sadly  none of these worked  I noticed that this was only happening on some projects and not others  On the project where it was failing  I ended up switching all of the framework versions to 4 7 1  did a clean rebuild and my  Go to Definition  started working again

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I tried David s solution  the one about clicking Empty Symbol Cache option  but it didn t work for me    How did I solve it    Close all files Clean solution Rebuild solution   For me this error does not make sense but I solved doing this

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I got the same problem  I did all those steps mentioned in all above comments  It didn t work  But when I closed Visual Studio  deleted   vs  folder  in the solution folder  then reopened Visual Studio  It now works like a charm  The problem is gone

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For me the navigate works just NO XAMARIN SOLUTIONS  That suggestions here DIDN  T WORKS     Devenv exe  resetuserdata not works for me   My solution was  Re-create the solutions  project  folders and works  No import   Detail  my project was on the VS 2015  the error was on the VS 2017

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I d say this is due to the new Roslyn C  compiler  in its github issue tracker you can find many of the actual developers encountering this and trying to fix it  but at present it is still open  https   github com dotnet roslyn issues 9602  I ve spent some time around this also  and I lost the battle  But the following workaround I ve found works well for me   WORKAROUND   Change the keyboard shortcut F12 -  Edit FindAllReferences  for TextEditor   This will find the definition and all references and focus the root node  definition  in the Find Symbol Results   Now pressing F12  ENTER will do the same as F12 before    For me it seems to work even better than just GoToDefinition  because    After hitting F12 you can choose a reference instead of the definition by pressing UP or DOWN You can simply cycle between the references and definition just with these few keys  F12  ENTER  UP  DOWN   easy to remember

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I had this error for quite sometime now until I couldn t take it anymore so I have tried all possbile solutions above  but none worked for me  I noticed that the error only pops up on a certain project only  like what a user mentioned above  but not on other projects  Because of that  since nothing is working  I cloned my project again on a different folder and it started working again

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Check the namespaces of the two classes    If you are adding classes in the Class library - Make sure you are using the    right Project type  There are two class library types  Class Library Package  and Class Library   Select the later one as it creates  dll file  which can then be added if needed in other solutions

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Clean solution  Restore nuget packages

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The following fixed this for me    In Solution Explorer  right click the solution name   Select  Clean Solution    After this successfully completed  I no longer received the error  and I didn t have to close and reopen anything

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The answer above is correct  but the path is slightly off  try this instead    AppData     Local Temp TFSTemp

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If you recently installed an add-in  consider uninstalling it  That s what worked for me

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It appears you need to have built the project at least once for caret browsing to become available   If you re experiencing this issue on a project you haven t built yet  try building it   That fixed it for me so I thought I d throw it out here   Ctrl Shift B

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The following worked out for me like a charm    I checked the warnings that showed up when I built the Project Some of them mentioned something about assembly version conflict  Visual studio suggested that I clicked on the warning and hit Enter  A popup window offered to automatically fix the issue and so I did  Problem solved

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try cleaning the solution or clean your project  this worked for me

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I have the same problem after update visual studio  so this is how do I solve the problem    Close visual studio  Delete all  vs folder from my project  Open visual studio   Open my project    Hope this helpful for anyone who has this problem

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Just had the same issue and it seems like there is a problem with VS 2015 and TFS  I got the problem after I merged some files to another branch  Tried several things and it worked    Close all open files and then VS Tools- Options- Debugging- Symbols- Empty Symbol Cache TFS Check in and get latest  For some reason it worked after this    Not sure why it occurs but this worked for me  it might also be worth to clear TFSTemp folder as mentioned by zvi   EDIT  This path   TMP  TFSTemp can be copy-pasted into windows explorer to access TFS temp

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Ran into this problem when using F12 to try and go to a method definition   All of the mentioned items  except the  resetuserdata - which I didn t try because it would be a pain to recover from  didn t work   What did work for me    Exit Visual Studio From a Command Prompt  go to the folder for your solution and run the following code  this deletes ALL bin and obj folders in your solution    FOR  F  tokens      G IN   DIR  B  AD  S bin   DO RMDIR  S  Q    G  FOR  F  tokens      G IN   DIR  B  AD  S obj   DO RMDIR  S  Q    G   Restart Visual Studio   Opening the solution should take a bit longer as it now rebuilds the obj folders      After doing this F12 worked   As a side note  I normally place this in a batch file in my solution s folder  along side the  sln file   This makes it easy to run later

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I m using VS 2017 15 7 5 and this stopped working for certain test files  I noticed that they were all the new ones I had recently added and that in Solution Explorer there was no arrow available to expand and see the properties   methods   I excluded and then re-included them into my project and the go to definition command worked again

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For some reason my call name xaml vb class had been excluded from the project  it seemed to happen after I got latest version from TFS   I just had to include it again and it works now

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Clean your cache symbols  Tools   Options   Debugging   Symbols   EmptySymbolCache    Open your solution in administrative mode   this resolved my issue

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I also came across this once  There is something wrong with TFS in VS 2015   I followed these steps and it worked   Cleared TFS Cache This might be here   C  Users  UserName  AppData Local Microsoft Team Foundation  Version  Cache   Note  path may vary based on operating system so don t blame me    Emptied Symbol Cache  Tools   Options   Debugging   Symbols   EmptySymbolCache Restarted Visual Studio  It Might ask for connecting to TFS again    This Worked for me

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Just do it    Close Visual Studio Go to project folder and delete  user file  may be hidden  Open Visual Studio

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I ve done all things above but my problem did not solve  trying to open project by VS 2017    after that I realized that the problem was my csproj file  My project  mvc   was created by VS 2015    So I edit my csproj file and replace    lt Import Project     packages Microsoft CodeDom Providers DotNetCompilerPlatform 1 0 0 build Microsoft CodeDom Providers DotNetCompilerPlatform props  Condition  Exists     packages Microsoft CodeDom Providers DotNetCompilerPlatform 1 0 0 build Microsoft CodeDom Providers DotNetCompilerPlatform props      gt    by this     lt Import Project     packages Microsoft CodeDom Providers DotNetCompilerPlatform 1 0 7 build net45 Microsoft CodeDom Providers DotNetCompilerPlatform props  Condition  Exists     packages Microsoft CodeDom Providers DotNetCompilerPlatform 1 0 7 build net45 Microsoft CodeDom Providers DotNetCompilerPlatform props      gt    It was all about the version of DotNetCompilerPlatform    the way that I understood this issue was that I created new mvc project by  VS 2017 and compared both csproj files - the new one and the one that created by VS 2015 -      Additional related info by https   stackoverflow com users 15667 xan  since answers are locked   For me  VS2019 opening an older solution  it was only affecting one project in the solution  The Imports looked like this    lt Import Project     packages Microsoft CodeDom Providers DotNetCompilerPlatform 1 0 0 build Microsoft CodeDom Providers DotNetCompilerPlatform props  Condition  Exists     packages Microsoft CodeDom Providers DotNetCompilerPlatform 1 0 0 build Microsoft CodeDom Providers DotNetCompilerPlatform props      gt   lt Import Project     packages Microsoft Net Compilers 1 0 0 build Microsoft Net Compilers props  Condition  Exists     packages Microsoft Net Compilers 1 0 0 build Microsoft Net Compilers props      gt   lt Import Project    MSBuildExtensionsPath    MSBuildToolsVersion  Microsoft Common props  Condition  Exists    MSBuildExtensionsPath    MSBuildToolsVersion  Microsoft Common props      gt    The working projects only had the    lt Import Project    MSBuildExtensionsPath    MSBuildToolsVersion  Microsoft Common props  Condition  Exists    MSBuildExtensionsPath    MSBuildToolsVersion  Microsoft Common props      gt    line  so I removed the first 2 and intelisense   go to definition etc  started working again   HOWEVER the web project now wouldn t run due to missing Roslyn csc compiler    In the end the solution that worked overall was to update the Microsoft CodeDom Providers DotNetCompilerPlatform and Microsoft Net Compilers Nuget packages for the project

[c#] Go To Definition: "Cannot navigate to the symbol under the caret."

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