Software Warlock

Visual Studio 2003 Web Projects Not Loading?

April 3rd, 2008

Took me a while to find a solution to this problem.

I checked out a project from Visual Source Safe (using the VS2005 client) to my local drive and tried to open the solution.  The solution contained several projects, two of which were web projects.  I had previously checked out the project to this computer, and IIS had virtual directories mapped to the old location.  I changed the target of the virtual directories to my newly checked out location and figured that everything would be OK.  No dice.

The problem was that Visual Studio claimed it couldn’t find the project files.  The virtual directories were mapped correctly.  Directory permissions were OK.  Crazy.

After searching the web for a while I was able to locate something that works.  To resolve the problem do the following:

1. Check out the project from source control (get latest).
2. Map virtual directories to correct locations.
3. Delete the project files for the web projects on the local computer (the .csproj and the .vspscc files for a C# web project).
4. Delete the solution preferences files (the .suo file).  This only exists if you have previously tried to open the project locally.
5. Launch Visual Studio and open the project.

Not exactly the most straight forward workaround.  But is seems to work.  Thankfully things seem a bit better in Visual Studio 2005.If I run into this problem again, I’ll record more specific error messages so Google will help locate the solution.  I’ll also try to get some screenshots.

Entry Filed under: .NET, Visual Studio