The project type is not supported by this installation

Question

Whenever I try to open a project  csproj  that s downloaded from the internet  most of the times  I get the       The project type is not supported by this installation    It appears that my Visual Studio installation is not corrupted  I can pretty much do everything with it other than open these csproj files   What may be causing this

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You could also try to run the following command   devenv  ResetSkipPkgs

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For Visual Studio 2010  prolly also for other versions    If you are opening an ASP NET MVC project make sure that the correct MVC version is installed on your PC  If you try to open an ASP NET MVC 3 project  first close all your visual studio instances and install MVC3  http   www microsoft com en-us download details aspx id 1491   For other ASP NET MVC versions download them from www asp net mvc or via Web Platform Installer 4 0

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Open up the  csproj file for your solution in wordpad or some text editor  Look for the ProjectTypeGuids  They indicate the required supported types for your solutions  Search the internet these GUIDs to find out what they require  For example E53F8FEA-EAE0-44A6-8774-FFD645390401 means it requires  MVC 3 0

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I had the same problem opening the NuGet solution with VS 2010 Ultimate  but the following command fixed it   devenv  ResetSkipPkgs

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I was having this problem trying to add a WPF project in a WCF solution in Visual Studio Express 2012 for Web   Deleting the content between the  ProjectTypeGuids  tags and leaving only the tags solved the problem  To know how to edit the  csproj file  read MindStalker comment

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Had the same issue with  The project type is not supported by this installation  for web projects in VS 2010 Premium       devenv  ResetSkipPkgs   and GUIDs magic did not help   Same projects were working fine on a neighbor box with VS 2010 Premium   As it turned out the only difference was that my VS installation was missing the following installed products  can be found in VS About dialog     Microsoft Office Developer Tools Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 SharePoint Developer Tools    Add Remove programs -  VS 2010 -  Customize -  Check the above products - and the problem was solved

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You might need to install the  Microsoft Web Platform Installer  from http   www microsoft com web downloads platform aspx

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edit please see the answer further down  which is about 18 months newer  and actually solves the problem  This historically once-accurate answer is no longer as accurate  Leaving intact after the break for this reason  - thanks - jcolebrand     What edition of VS do you use  VS2008 Express  Standard  Pro or Team System  VS2010 Professional  Premium or Ultimate  I would expect that the project you downloaded was created using a higher edition of Visual Studio and uses some of those advanced features  Thus you can not open it   EDIT  It is also possible that you lack some advanced frameworks like newer versions of Windows Mobile SDK  but if I recall correctly the error message in such case is different

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Problem for me was my ProjectTypeGuid was MVC4 but I didn t have that installed on the target server  The solution was to change the ProjectTypeGuids to that of a Class Library  and include the MVC DLLs with the project rather than the project pick them up from the GAC

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Instead of searching fr the GUIDs  you can simply delete the GUIds tags   Then try opening the project again   The second time opening you should get a more reasonable error message     For instance my issue was that I did not install SharePoint Developer Tools when I installed Visual Studio 2010 on my development Virtual Machine   So when I tried opennign the project after deleting the GUIDs  VS2010 told me the path it was looking for did not exist     Therefore VS2010 was looking for a SharePoint library that was not installed   I simply had to run the install again  and then add that feature

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If you are using VS 2010 and it is a ASP NET project make sure you have the Visual Developer installed from the VS 2010 CD   This is not the free one  but part of what is required to work on ASP NET projects in Visual Studio

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As a addition to this   the project type is not supported by this installation  can occur if you re trying to open a project on a computer which does not contain the framework version that is targeted   In my case I was trying to open a class library which was created on a machine with VS2012 and had defaulted the targeted framework to 4 5  Since I knew this library wasn t using any 4 5 bits  I resolved the issue by editing the  csproj file from  lt TargetFrameworkVersion gt v4 5 lt  TargetFrameworkVersion gt  to  lt TargetFrameworkVersion gt v4 0 lt  TargetFrameworkVersion gt   or whatever is appropriate for your project  and the library opened

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I had similar issue with c   first I found that each project may have a few different types  i e  in  csproject file locate ProjectTypeGuids  it should be a few guids  i e    lt ProjectTypeGuids gt  F85E285D-A4E0-4152-9332-AB1D724D3325   349c5851-65df-11da-9384-00065b846f21   fae04ec0-301f-11d3-bf4b-00c04f79efbc  lt  ProjectTypeGuids gt    they will point on component you are missing  In my case it was ASP NET MVC 2  Some guys get it worked by installing MVC 2 destribution   My case was worse  because installation didn t work  but it turned out that it was because I had Express 2008 and 2010  I fixed it by uninstalling both 2008  amp  2010 and installing only 2010 versions  For c  you need both Visual C  Express and Visual Web Developer express

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My problems because this line in project   csproj  has newline  vs2010    lt ProjectTypeGuids gt   lt  ProjectTypeGuids gt    When i update to   lt ProjectTypeGuids gt  lt  ProjectTypeGuids gt    I can open again

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This can also be encountered while trying to open an ASP Net MVC project while you don t have ASP Net MVC installed with your Visual Studio 2010  In my case it was ASP Net MVC 3 0

[visual-studio] The project type is not supported by this installation

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