Opening solution using Visual Studio 2017

Question

I have been working on this little mobile app for android using Xamarin in Visual Studio 2017.

When opening the solution with the laptop that I used to develop the app works like a charm. Then I zip the entire folder over the solution.

../myFolder/
    app1/                     //here is all the code
    app1.sln                  //solution file

 myFolder.zip

Transfer the zip file to other laptop/PC through usb, email and online repository, even extensions like rar, 7zp and tar. I simply can not load the solution from other Visual Studio but the one where I created/developed the application originally.

Hours passing with this screen then VS is not responding and after that, it simply crashes/closes with no error message.

In the other hand, I can open any solution created from any other PC in my laptop without issues. After saving, I haven't found the pattern yet, but some solutions can't be opened from the original PC which creates them nor others.

Answer 1

You may be using an older version of Visual Studio on the PC you've facing the issue. I've faced that too.

It was a known bug (reported here and here) already fixed on newer versions.

The workaround is to close VS, delete the folder vs created in the same directory of your solution and try to reopen it.

To avoid other problems on compiling or running your app after that, I recommend you also to delete all bin and obj folders from your project's folders, clean and rebuild the solution.

It's safer keep all your development environments updated in software wise to avoid this kind of trouble.

I hope it helps.