Today I selected \"Work Items\" as I have a million times before but this time I was met with this error along the top of my \"Team Explorer\" tab:
\"Page
If you get this issue in VS2015 and running "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 14.0\Common7\IDE\devenv" /setup doesn't fix you issue you can try the following:
Here are the steps I followed. Please make sure you follow them in correct sequence. These steps are for VS 2015. Use 12.0 (instead of 14.0) for VS 2013 and 10.0 for VS 2010
I encounter the same problem with you, and resolved by run the VS as administrator
To fix the issue simply run the below command in an elevated command prompt as detailed here.
"C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 12.0\Common7\IDE\devenv.exe" /setup
My understanding is this command forces the recreation (what Microsoft refers to as "merging") of current VS settings into what is apparently a corrupt settings cache. On the surface, this is similar to deleting the directory path C:\Users\username\AppData\Local\Microsoft\VisualStudio\version and allowing visual studio to recreate it at launch. However, I prefer to not to delete this outright and instead rely on re-merge approach.
Recently I found this sometimes occurs when I launch several solutions at once (i.e. I have 1 or more Visual Studio instances loading a solution at the same time). I also have ReSharper, SQL Prompt, VSCommands and TFS Power Tools installed which I'm sure contribute to some degree.
UPDATE:
This fix should work for all versions of Visual Studio, however you will need to execute the command in the directory appropriate to your version. For example with Visual Studio 2015 the path would be:
"C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 14.0\Common7\IDE\devenv.exe" /setup
Version mappings for Visual Studio (original version mapping answer here):
This happend also with my installation of VS '13 when I installed VS '15. Removing the files at "C:\Users\username\AppData\Local\Microsoft\VisualStudio\12.0\ComponentModelCache"
did the job for me.
Deleting all files in ComponentModelCache folder worked for me
For Visual Studio 2013: "C:\Users\username\AppData\Local\Microsoft\VisualStudio\12.0\ComponentModelCache"
For Visual Studio 2015: "C:\Users\username\AppData\Local\Microsoft\VisualStudio\14.0\ComponentModelCache"
or
%userprofile%\AppData\Local\Microsoft\VisualStudio\14.0\ComponentModelCache