Visual Studio “Go to definition” disabled or gray out - visual-studio-2013

Visual Studio's Go To Definition is disabled and F12 doesn't work. Other commands like Alt-F12 may continue working.

Close the solution.
Delete the intellisense database file for the solution: [solution].ncb or [solution].suo
Reopen the solution.
Optional: Rebuild the solution.

Note that this can also be as a result of disabling database for C++/C#.
In Tools - Options, type "IntelliSense" into the search box, and click on C/C++ - Advanced. In the Browsing/Navigation section, change Disable Database to False, if it is not so already.
After re-enabling, close and reopen to force rebuild.
NOTE: IntelliSense will produce large files on disk (*.sdf and ipch) that should be excluded from Git, for example.

I know the solution has been resolved. However, I encountered the exact same problem. I searched internet. None of the trick works including this one.
Eventually, I figured out. I right clicked on the file that had the problem. I included the file in the project. Isn't that obvious. Actually not, the file has been included for a week. I have been working on that file more than 7 hours a day for the whole week. Up till yesterday 6:20 pm.
Oh, I could not compile correctly this morning. There were tons of syntax error message yesterday. This morning, I was able to compile. Strange. right? Then my go to definition was gone.
Took me a while to find out cs and designer.cs were certainly excluded, but aspx file was.
I solved the problem. Did my figure slip? I don't know.
That is one thing people check. Either yourself, someone else, or system accidentally exclude the cs files without the knowledge. I know it is strange, but it solved the problem. There are weird scenarios in Visual studio. People can present 200 solutions. They work for 99% of time, but not our cases. I just bring one more scenario

I encountered this in Visual Studio 2010.
For me, this solution did the trick
Close all the files.
Reopen the files.
and you are good to go.

This also happens, if Visual Studio has files opened, which are not in the current Solution.
I don't know how I got to this state, where files of a different solution where open as I didn't open them manually, but a quick check of the file path showed that those weren't files of the opened solution.
Therefore, "Go to Definition" was disabled.

I found that I had to remove my TFS mapping:
VS 2010 > open Team Explorer > Drill into the team project > double click source control > right click on the team project in the left pane and do "Remove Mapping" > after everything was removed I manually went to the local folder and deleted any lingering files > back in source control explorer I re-mapped to the same local folder and re-pulled all the code. Now the "go to definition" works again.
Not sure why I had to do this...

Check dll in references which is yellow. Remove it and add again.

I've just had this happen with a CMake-based C++ project in Visual Studio 2019. Everything was fine yesterday, then when I opened it up today all the Go To Definition/Declaration etc options were greyed out everywhere in every file in the project, even for things defined within the same file (and the syntax highlighting didn't look right either). It did work if I opened one of the .cpp files separately on its own (without loading the Project/Solution).
I tried various things including the answers here and telling it to generate the CMake cache again, but what finally fixed it was actually deleting the CMake cache. The Delete Cache option didn't seem to work (all the files were still there on disk, and there was some sort of failure message in the Output window) so I just deleted the entire "out" directory from the project directory (well, moved it somewhere outside of the project, just in case). Loaded up Visual Studio again, it rebuilt the cache again automatically and IntelliSense immediately started working again! I just had to wait 5 minutes for it to compile everything again when I wanted to run the project.
Maybe it wasn't necessary to remove the entire "out" directory, but when I clicked "Open in Explorer" under the "CMake Cache" menu it opened the actual build directory (which was the only thing in the "out" directory anyway) so I assumed the entire thing was related to the cache and was getting too fed up with it to try to narrow it down further. It's probably only certain files within that directory really.

Tried all the above solutions in my VS2019, nothing worked for me. Than I've noticed an update sign on the bottom Right corner. After updating the VS all options were restored.

Simple just check your bottom left corner of Visual Studio if Restricted turn it as a trusted and your problem will solve.

In my case due to my project is mapped with TFS so I am unable to go to definition also my project files showing read only when opening from Solution. So I have move to my root folder mapped with TFS and then right-clicked on folder > Go to properties > Attributes section was Read-Only I have unchecked it and clicked Apply. Reopen visual studio. Everything is now working fine.

I faced the same Issue in my Visual Studio 2019 version.I followed the below Steps:
Go to references folder in the solution.
Click on Manage Nuget packages.
Click on Browse.
Search for 'Microsoft.Net.Compilers'.
Click on Update.
This Worked for me.

In my case, another Visual Stuidio was opened (not closed succsessfully). Close all examples of VS, then re open solution.

Just open the Solution using Windows Explorer, instead of opening it from inside VS...

Related

Visual Studio sometimes not saving files

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!
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?
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.
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

Visual Studio freezing (crashing) while loading solution

I've met with a strange problem. I had 7 projects in the solution. I had to add another MVC project. Now when the document (from the new project) is opened (for example HomeController.cs) and when this project is initializing at the start, it freezes the whole IDE like this:
(Some projects do not load)
After that, I have to kill the process. When I open VS again and fast click on another project (which is initializing) the freezing issue is gone. I have no idea what can cause a problem like this. I've tried with and without ReSharper but I get the same result. Also, I restored default settings of VS. Also repaired whole VS.
Maybe someone had the same problem and could give some helpful advice?
Usually removing of the hidden .vs folder in solution directory fixes the problem.
Possible solutions:
Delete .vs folder as mentioned above
Clear temp files from %USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\Temp
Readjust source control in Tools -> Options -> Source control -> Plugins, set to None, Save, close VS. Then reopen it and reset the plugin.
There is no particular order, but one of them might help.
I experienced the same issue with VS 2019 and fixed it by deleting the user.json file from %USERPROFILE%\AppData\Roaming\Visual Studio Setup
EDIT
The issue reappeared after a few days, so I located the user settings for Visual Studio 2019 (%USERPROFILE%\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\VisualStudio\16.0_f124b472) and deleting the following files seemed to have reset VS to a normal state:
Current.vsk
User.vsk
ObjBrowEx.dat
Please close all your solutions before deleting the files
I used to have this problem, it was solved just by double clicking any of the stuck projects. This nudges the loading process somehow and causes unloaded projects to complete its loading.
Delete the .suo file in the solution folder.
I am pretty sure I found this answer somewhere on Stackoverflow before, but now I can't find it anymore. Credits to whoever came up with this.
None of above answers worked for me and found this solution.
By opening solution in safe mode devenv.exe /SafeMode will show you details about file causing issue and then
Search for all the files in the project directory with extension *.user
and remove them all
last reloaded the projects
For Visual Studio 2019, I cleared my %USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\Temp folder.
It worked.
When you get over the past install multiply versions and the previous version was not fully uninstalled. This cause this issue in my case.
Control Panel > Programs > Programs and Features
Search for all Visual Studio related programs and Uninstall those.

Global Section inside Solution File (.sln) of Visual Studio Solution secret?

Recently I was trying to load a solution source controlled by TFS but some projects in that solution were not being loaded in solution explorer inside visual studio. After spending hours of my time, for temporary reason when I deleted the whole "Global Section" at the end of .sln (solution file) by manually editing it in a notepad and restarted Visual Studio, all projects appeared as expected. I am using VS 2008. It hasn't shown any odd behavior yet, but couldn't understand the reason.
Does "Global Section" in solution file play and important role? Any harm in removing global section?
Well, you just deleted any source control bindings, plus build configuration and some solution-specific settings.
VS should revert to defaults if it doesn't find the section, though I suppose it would have been better if you knew just what was causing the issue. If the problem was with TFS then maybe resetting that fixed the problem.
As to harm, again, if VS is able to cope with the removal of the section and can revert to defaults then I see no harm. Of course you might lose configuration information, which will have to be re-applied.

Visual Studio 2010 closes open files after git pull

We're using VS 2010 and GIT. Occasionally, after a git pull, all open files will close--seems like this happens when new files are added to the project. I can't seem to find a related file that shouldn't be in version control. Has anyone else had this issue?
I figured out a solution to this. It's a little annoying but it works around the tedious task of re-opening all of your tabs/files in VS.
When you get the VS warning that the Project has been modified outside of VS it asks if you want to reload the project. Choose "Ignore."
Next, save all your work, close VS and reopen your solution or project. All the files/tabs you had open previously will be open again and the updates to the project file, obviously, will also be loaded.
Another caveat to this is you lose all your "Undo" potential in your open files.
When a .vcproj file gets touched (not necessarily changed), all its opened files are closed and never reopened. Might this be what you are experiencing?
Check out
WorkspaceReloder.
It's a visual studio add in that will keep your files open upon reloading. It's tremendously useful and will keep you from having to go through those ridiculous steps. Productivity++.

Is there any way to get Visual Studio to reload all projects when the .proj files have changed?

If I do an svn update while I have Visual Studio open and a number of project files have changed (but not the solution file) I have to wait and click yes on the reload project dialog box every time. Sometimes this can take a while depending on how many projects have changed and how slow my pc is being.
Is there a way to say 'reload all' after the first dialog pops up, like holding down shift to force no to all in the Windows Explorer dialog? (note: I already tried this, it doesn't work)
if you install this plugin from the visual studio gallery:
http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/d491911d-97f3-4cf6-87b0-6a2882120acf/
The button "Reload all" appears.
Regards,
Koen
Deleting my solution_name.v11.suo file (hidden file stored in same location as solution file) seemed to do the trick.
Unfortunately, VS doesn't come with a way to do this. A probable workaround is to touch the solution file before activation VS. It would then reload the whole solution.
There must, however, be ways to do this programmatically, since I remember CMake solutions asking me whether I wanted to reload the whole solution after individual projects were re-generated. CMake is Open Source, so if you're really desperate, you might want to look into it.
Use a tool like VisualSVN to automate the process for you. It allows you to perform the update within Visual Studio, then automatically reloads the projects that have been modified.
I got my project to bind in my solution by closing the solution (File -> Close Solution) then reopening it.
If your project is hosted on a TFS, then delete the solution file and get latest. VS will prompt you to Reload all projects. Press Reload All.
Adding a bit automation here, in case you have multiple solutions and fd installed (also available for windows), fd -IH suo -X rm will delete all those .suo files pointed out by Luke.

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