Visual Studio sometimes not saving files - visual-studio

Question

I am getting an inconsistent error with Visual Studio 2015 that is severely hampering my productivity.
I am working on a very large application that I have pulled down from TFS. Sometimes when working I will try and save the file that I was working on, and have the asterix not go away and the file not save. This is despite running the application in Administrator.
Sometimes the solution is simply to rebuild the project and then try to save, however when this doesn't work I need close down visual studio and start up again, losing all my saves anyways.
This isn't too bad when I am working on .net files because the problem happens a lot less, and the solution is almost always to just rebuild, which is much better than having to re boot vs. However recently I have been working on javascript files within visual studio, and with them I get about one save, then the problems comes up, and rebuilding doesn't fix issue, causing me to have to reboot visual studio every save I make...
I have tried searching online for people who have faced a similar issue, or asked around my work, and no one seems to have ever had a similar problem. So hopefully, for my sanity's sake, someone knows what the heck is going on with my visual studio. Thanks!

Answer 1

I am currently running VS2019 16.7.2 and sometimes it just refuses to save no matter what I do. I try Ctrl + S, File -> "Save all", closing the window (which causes the changes to be lost) but nothing works.
Though for some reason when first I press the File -> "Save ... as" option in the menu and then cancel it, that releases the "save lock" and suddenly I am able to save again. Not really a satisfactory solution but at least all changes aren't lost. Maybe it will work on other versions as well?

Answer 2

I will give an answer to a problem which might not be exactly the same as the one reported by the author, but it is fairly close, and people searching for a solution to this problem are likely to arrive to this question.
In my case, in my entire solution containing thousands of files, there was only one particular file that Visual Studio was consistently failing to save when needed. As a result, after each commit, the "Git Changes" tab would not appear completely empty. All files would be committed, except this one file, which would appear as still uncommitted. So, I would have to manually save it and then amend the last commit in order to arrive at a completely empty "Git Changes" tab.
I thought that the problem might be due to some discrepancy between the letter case of the filename on disk (which is what the "Git Changes" view reports) and the letter case of the filename in the visual studio project file (which is what the "Solution Explorer" view reports) but it turns out that this was not it.
After much troubleshooting, I discovered that the following sequence of magical incantations solves the problem, I have no idea why:
In "Solution Explorer" locate the problematic file.
Rename the problematic file to something else.
Commit (with amend if you wish) the file.
Rename the file back to its original name.
Commit (with amend) the file again.
Restart Visual Studio.
The last step of restarting Visual studio is not strictly speaking necessary, but it is useful in case you have a letter case mismatch, because Visual Studio seems to be somehow caching filenames, (or at any rate not detecting that the capitalization of a filename has changed,) and restarting it makes it come to its senses.

Answer 3

I realize this is an old question but I had a similar problem with a solution file I had upgraded from Visual Studio 2015 to Visual Studio 2022. I was unable to save any changes to the solution, although the file was writable in notepad.
Deleting the section in the solution file as suggested by Richard Stanton's workaround fixed it for me!
developercommunity.visualstudio.com Workaround
Delete the following section from the solution file:
ProjectSection(FolderStartupServices) = postProject
{B4F97281-0DBD-4835-9ED8-7DFB966E87FF} = {B4F97281-0DBD-4835-9ED8-7DFB966E87FF}
EndProjectSection