Troubleshooting project type not supported in Visual Studio
February 04, 2011 by Daniel HoelblingI was tasked with fixing an old legacy component that has been developed for Windows Mobile. Although the source code was available, I was unable to open up the solution due to my Visual Studio not supporting the project type.
Initially I spent hours downloading and installing SDKs for Pocket PC hoping to fix the issue, but after exhausting every SDK from Windows Mobile 2003 through 5 to 6.5.3 I finally gave up.
I took a closer look at the .csproj file, trying to determine how to find out what project type I am missing.
Turns out the project type is saved as a GUID in your .csproj file and you can simply google for that project type to find out what tool/sdk it’s associated with.
Turns out, my Visual Studio was missing a 3rd party designer component, preventing me to open up the whole project in VS.
Anyway, in your .csproj search for the <ProjectTypeGuids> – You should see GUIDs seperated by semicolons that specify exactly what project types have to be present in your Visual Studio.
This clearly goes into the category named: “Stuff I wish I knew 5 hours ago”
