I have a small visual studio project that is in my personal directory. I know need to copy this project to my team directory but am having issues with the solution file.
I have been following this example. All is fine until I get near to the bottom of the page at the section Editing the Solution File. When I open my solution file in notepad++ most of it is NUL or other unreadable symbols. I can see a few lines of english which is the directory location. However doing a ctrl find of "Microsoft Visual Studio Solution File" does not find anything or even the word "Project".
I have tried updating the directory location to the new location in this file but the solution does not load in Visual Studio. It just seems to me my solution file is pretty different to the one in the example?
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A friend sent me his visual studio project that contains 2 files:
naomi.sln
naomi.v12.suo
When I try to open the first file I get the error in visual studios:
One or more projects in the solution were not loaded correctly. Please see the Output Window for details.
How can I open the project?
You don't actually have the project (only the solution - .sln file). The project file should have .vcproj or .vcxproj extension. The .suo file contains some solution user data (as seen in [MS.Docs]: Solution User Options (.Suo) File). Get the project file that the solution references, and you'll be able to open it.
I am using Visual Studio 2010 and somehow the people who created this project have a folder which contains files for multiple projects in a single solution.
Is there a way to find in which project in the solution explorer a file is included ?
Outside of Solution Explorer, you can use a utility like WinGrep to search all .csproj files (or if not using c#, whatever extension for your project files).
I do that type of thing all the time. A project file is really just a text file that can be searched like any other text file.
Since then I found that Microsoft Productivity Power Tools does this. When installing it you get a 'Solution Navigator' in the 'Solution Explorer' tab which allows you to search files and it will display to which project it belongs.
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The project I'm working on normally runs on an embedded Linux system, but we have a rehosted version for debugging in Windows. Naturally the Visual Studio project isn't always kept up-to-date with the files in our "real" project.
Sometimes a file is moved from one directory to another. This leaves Visual Studio unable to locate the file.
I know I can close Visual Studio, open the project file in a text editor, and manually change the file location. But this is annoying. How can I point Visual Studio to the new file location without manually editing the project file in a text editor?
First off, you don't need to close Visual Studio. You can unload a project (Solution Explorer > right click on project > Unload project), then right-click again and choose "Edit", this opens the project file in VS's text editor. After you save the file you can tell VS to reload the project by right-clicking the project node again.
However in your case, a better solution might be to use wildcard expressions in your project file, as documented here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms171454.aspx and http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms171453.aspx
i.e. Use a double-asterisk to tell VS to recursively search a directory to include files matching another wildcard pattern.
e.g.
<ItemsGroup>
<Compile Include="**/*.cpp" Exclude="SomeSpecificFileToExclude.cpp" />
</ItemsGroup>
In Visual Studio, if I try to copy a file from one project to another (by using Copy and Paste or by dragging the file to the new project while holding the Ctrl key) it creates a reference to the source file in the original location. Is there a way to create a physical copy of the source file and place that in the target project source direction without having to resort to using Windows Explorer to copy the file manually?
It's not pretty, but when I want to do what you're suggesting, I double-click on the file in Visual Studio, which opens it. Then I do a File->Save As, choose the right directory and save it. All from within Visual Studio. This is usually followed by adding the new file to the other project.
Was just doing this and realized I should mention a side-effect. Depending on your source control (in my case, TFS 2010), doing this from within Visual Studio may modify the location of the file in the project. For me, this means making sure that neither the file nor its project have any pending changes, doing the save as, then doing an undo of the change this causes in TFS 2010 (project change, file add and delete).
From http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/0fb6xxhb.aspx:
If you are working with solution items, Visual C++ projects, or other similar projects, you are always working with links in Solution Explorer. If you are working with Visual Basic projects, Visual C# projects, and other projects, you might be working with links or files.
Essentially, the answer to my question is 'No'. In most cases, I must use Windows Explorer.
I'm working on my first project in Visual Studio and I haven't used Windows much since '05, so please bear with me.
I've got my project open in Visual Studio 2008, and I'm trying to open a particular file for editing, but I get an error that says
"c:\path\to\file
Cannot open file.
I've verified that the file exists, and I can open it from Windows Explorer, but nothing from inside Visual Studio, any ideas?
I'm not familiar with Visual Studio, so my terminology might be incorrect.
The file appears in the tree in the Visual Studio Explorer pane, so I double clicked it, and got the error. The error said nothing more than the file path: Cannot open file.
How can I check permissions/ACLs in Windows? I assumed that since I could open it in Windows Explorer, I would be able to open it in Visual Studio.
And it's a .cpp file.
You may want to right-click on the file in the tree, and delete it from the project.
Then, add back an existing item.
Hopefully that will fix the problem.
Though I'm not familiar with this specifically, if you just want to move forward, I'd recommend creating a new project type and just adding all the existing files to it. Should be quicker and easier than diagnosing what could be many issues.
Other things to check: encoding type of the project file, permissions/ACLs (can you open that actual file from an unelevated VS prompt, for instance), etc.
Additionnaly to the other answers, I found out that this problem may arrise if the target .Net framework version specified in the project file isn't installed.
This seems to prevent visual studio from opening all the files contained in the project, and showing the "Unable to open file " message.
Correcting the version (in the csproj file or in the settings), saving and reloading the project fixes the problem.
I had same problem, my project were build on (.Net 4.5), which I uninstalled on my PC and replaced by (.Net 4.8), so just replacing project's target framework to the one which is installed "in my case (.Net 4.8)" should fix it.