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I have Visual Studio 2012 Professional. When I try to open a particular csproj I get an error message

The project type is not supported by this installation.

It doesn't say what 'project type' the project is, nor what I need to install to be able to open it.

On inspecting the .csproj file, I see the lines

<ProductVersion>9.0.30729</ProductVersion>
<ProjectTypeGuids>{349c5851-65df-11da-9384-00065b846f21};{fae04ec0-301f-11d3-bf4b-00c04f79efbc}</ProjectTypeGuids>

So what do need I install to be able to open this project? Please provide a link!

Necoras
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Colonel Panic
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3 Answers3

18

Found Visual Studio 2012 in the old 'add remove programs', then pressed 'change'. Fixed by installing 'Microsoft Web Developer Tools'

enter image description here

Colonel Panic
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2

There is a really easy way to solve this.

Probably some of the dependencies are missing, and it is really hard to find out which one.

Go to

http://www.asp.net/downloads

Download ASP.NET and WebTools for your version of Visual Studio

A web platform installer will come up, which will install all the required tools

This solved my problem

There is no need to go through the ProjectTypeGuids

adib.mosharrof
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1

Thanks to this ProjectType GUID lookup table hosted on github (original codeproject link here), you can specifically understand what each of your GUIDs are:

{349c5851-65df-11da-9384-00065b846f21};{fae04ec0-301f-11d3-bf4b-00c04f79efbc}
Description GUID
... ...
ASP.NET MVC 5 {349C5851-65DF-11DA-9384-00065B846F21}
... ...
C# {FAE04EC0-301F-11D3-BF4B-00C04F79EFBC}

That is, when <ProjectTypeGuids> contains {349c5851-65df-11da-9384-00065b846f21};{fae04ec0-301f-11d3-bf4b-00c04f79efbc} you're looking at an ASP.NET MVC 5 site written in C#

The accepted answer shows you how to fix it/ open projects of these types, but I was curious what type of projects these are before I try to fix.

Also the accepted answer is focused on fixing these projects in Visual Studio 2012 but one comment mentions about not working with 2015.

For me (on Visual Studio 2017), I will try to fix it by installing

  • "ASP.NET and web development" and
  • ".NET desktop development"

(the second one might be optional) using Visual Studio Installer, as described here, and shown in screenshot below (from this article)

a screenshot of Visual Studio installer, installing two Workloads, "ASP.NET and web development" and ".NET desktop development"

Nate Anderson
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