Go To Definition: “Cannot navigate to the symbol u

Question

I suddenly started experiencing a problem today in my project where clicking Go To Definition gives me a strange error: "Cannot navigate to the symbol under the caret."

I first noticed it some time after installing Costura.Fody via NuGet. I've since uninstalled it but the problem persists. I've cleaned and rebuilt the solution multiple times. There are no instances of "Fody" or "Costura" anywhere in my git commit history, before or after the point in time when this started happening, so I'm thinking that one of my .gitignore'd files is stuck in a bad state.

The problem only occurs if the definition being targeted is in another file; Go To Definition for something in the currently opened file works fine. Peek Definition works fine too. Other solutions/projects work fine as well -- it's only this one that's causing issues.

I'm using Visual Studio 2015. The issue doesn't seem to occur in the 2013 version.

Why does this error occur and how can I fix it?

Answer 1

I tried David's solution (the one about clicking Empty Symbol Cache option) but it didn't work for me.

How did I solve it?

• Close all files
• Clean solution
• Rebuild solution

For me this error does not make sense but I solved doing this!

Answer 2

If you recently installed an add-in, consider uninstalling it. That's what worked for me.

Answer 3

I have the same problem after update visual studio, so this is how do I solve the problem.

1. Close visual studio.
2. Delete all .vs folder from my project.
3. Open visual studio.
4. Open my project.

Hope this helpful for anyone who has this problem.

Answer 4

After doing a "devenv.exe /resetuserdata", my VAssistX fails, so, actually, this reminds me that VAssistX can resolve the problem by Goto Implementation (Alt+G).

Answer 5

For me the navigate works just NO XAMARIN SOLUTIONS. That suggestions here DIDN´T WORKS. :( Devenv.exe /resetuserdata not works for me.

My solution was: Re-create the solutions, project, folders and works. No import. Detail: my project was on the VS 2015, the error was on the VS 2017.

Answer 6

The answer above is correct, but the path is slightly off, try this instead:

%AppData%\..\Local\Temp\TFSTemp