The project type is not supported by this installation

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 s

Answer 1

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 2

If you are using VS 2010 and it is a ASP.NET project make sure you have the Visual Developer installed from the VS 2010 CD. This is not the free one, but part of what is required to work on ASP.NET projects in Visual Studio.

Answer 3

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 4

I was having this problem trying to add a WPF project in a WCF solution in Visual Studio Express 2012 for Web. Deleting the content between the "ProjectTypeGuids" tags and leaving only the tags solved the problem. To know how to edit the .csproj file, read MindStalker comment.

Answer 5

Had the same issue with "The project type is not supported by this installation" for web projects in VS 2010 Premium.

devenv /ResetSkipPkgs

and GUIDs magic did not help.

Same projects were working fine on a neighbor box with VS 2010 Premium.

As it turned out the only difference was that my VS installation was missing the following installed products (can be found in VS About dialog):

• Microsoft Office Developer Tools
• Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 SharePoint Developer Tools

Add/Remove programs -> VS 2010 -> Customize -> Check the above products - and the problem was solved.

Answer 6

edit please see the answer further down, which is about 18 months newer, and actually solves the problem. This historically once-accurate answer is no longer as accurate. Leaving intact after the break for this reason. - thanks - jcolebrand

---

What edition of VS do you use? VS2008 Express, Standard, Pro or Team System? VS2010 Professional, Premium or Ultimate? I would expect that the project you downloaded was created using a higher edition of Visual Studio and uses some of those advanced features. Thus you can not open it.

EDIT: It is also possible that you lack some advanced frameworks like newer versions of Windows Mobile SDK, but if I recall correctly,the error message in such case is different.