The project type is not supported by this installa

Question

Whenever I try to open a project (csproj) that's downloaded from the internet, most of the times, I get the

"The project type is not supported by this installation"

It appears that my Visual Studio installation is not corrupted (I can pretty much do everything with it other than open these csproj files)

What may be causing this?

Answer 1

You might need to install the "Microsoft Web Platform Installer" from http://www.microsoft.com/web/downloads/platform.aspx

Answer 2

I had similar issue with c#, first I found that each project may have a few different types. i.e. in .csproject file locate ProjectTypeGuids, it should be a few guids, i.e.

<ProjectTypeGuids>{F85E285D-A4E0-4152-9332-AB1D724D3325};{349c5851-65df-11da-9384-00065b846f21};{fae04ec0-301f-11d3-bf4b-00c04f79efbc}</ProjectTypeGuids>

they will point on component you are missing. In my case it was ASP.NET MVC 2. Some guys get it worked by installing MVC 2 destribution.

My case was worse, because installation didn't work, but it turned out that it was because I had Express 2008 and 2010. I fixed it by uninstalling both 2008 & 2010 and installing only 2010 versions. For c# you need both Visual C# Express and Visual Web Developer express

Answer 3

For Visual Studio 2010 (prolly also for other versions):

If you are opening an ASP.NET MVC project make sure that the correct MVC version is installed on your PC. If you try to open an ASP.NET MVC 3 project, first close all your visual studio instances and install MVC3: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=1491

For other ASP.NET MVC versions download them from www.asp.net/mvc or via Web Platform Installer 4.0.

Answer 4

This can also be encountered while trying to open an ASP.Net MVC project while you don't have ASP.Net MVC installed with your Visual Studio 2010. In my case it was ASP.Net MVC 3.0

Answer 5

My problems because this line in project (.csproj) has newline (vs2010)

<ProjectTypeGuids>
</ProjectTypeGuids>

When i update to

<ProjectTypeGuids></ProjectTypeGuids>

I can open again

Answer 6

Problem for me was my ProjectTypeGuid was MVC4 but I didn't have that installed on the target server. The solution was to change the ProjectTypeGuids to that of a Class Library, and include the MVC DLLs with the project rather than the project pick them up from the GAC.