Develop Reference

Checkout A Project With Git And Visual Studio

I recently started using Git with Visual Studio 2015 and I'm trying to modify the properties of an installer project. The issue is that it won't let me because the project isn't checked out and I don't see an option to check out the project with Git through Visual Studio. The only place I even see the mention of the words 'Check Out' is under branches and it's grayed out.

I'm having the same problem in VS2015. It seems to be an issue with the Installer Project extension. For some reason Visual Studio doesn't detect when you attempt to change the Setup Project file (with YourProject.vdproj), and doesn't automatically unlock it for you. I had the same problem with TFS, but in that case all you had to do is manually unlock the file, by right clicking on it. I've just migrated to Git, and the problem is still there, but now you can't unlock the file by right-clicking on it (since there is no explicit check-out in git).
I'm still looking into the problem, but the only solution I've come up with now, is making a quick manual edit of YourProject.vdproj in Notepad. Visual Studio WILL recognize that edit, and unlock the file for you. After that you can continue to use IDE to make changes to the Installer project.
Unfortunately, the problem comes back once you check in your changes, and try to modify the file again. You will once more have to manually edit it to force Visual Studio to unlock it for you.
EDIT: After spending a few hours on this, I finally came up with a proper fix, which I verified works on a few in-house projects. Here are the steps:
Open your solution file in notepad, and delete the following section: GlobalSection(TeamFoundationVersionControl)
Open the solution containing locked Setup Project in Visual Studio.
Go to Tools > Options > Source Control > Plug-in Selection, and pick 'None' from the dropdown.
Click Yes to the dialog that warns you the project will be closed.
Open the solution again, you will be prompted to permanently remove
source control bindings from the projects. Click Yes to that.
You can now go back to Tools > Options > Source Control > Plug-in
Selection and pick Git again.
At this point the problem is fixed, and you will be able to modify
your Setup Project without any issues.
I found that removing bindings is clearing the values of the following tags from the project files:
<SccProjectName>SAK</SccProjectName>
<SccLocalPath>SAK</SccLocalPath>
<SccAuxPath>SAK</SccAuxPath>
<SccProvider>SAK</SccProvider>
Apparently SAK stands for 'Should Already Know'.

Here is a workaround I found,
Mark the project installer in the Solution explorer, And click "Save" (not save all).
For me it did the trick.
If it's still didn't help try to reopen VS and try the method again.
Cheers!

Open a command line, go to where you need to check it out, then issue the git checkout command? http://git-scm.com/docs/git-checkout

Like Eternal21 I encountered this problem when trying to modify an Installer project, this was in a VS2013 (rather than VS2015) project though and I could not see a GlobalSection(TeamFoundationVersionControl) in the solution file. However the following steps worked;
Go to Tools > Options > Source Control > Plug-in Selection, and pick 'None' from the dropdown.
Make the change required to the Installer project
Go back to Tools > Options > Source Control > Plug-in Selection and select Git again.
(and the Solution did not ask to be closed).

You need to create a new empty repo on your Git server first, then clone it to a folder on your local computer.
After that you will be able to add your project and check it in by adding it to the local folder.

I was able to work around this problem by simply editing the vdproj file (setup project file) manually in Notepad++ (you can use any text editor), making some temporary changes into it (type a character and backspace) and saving the file. This effectively checks out the project from GIT. Now you can come back to Visual Studio and make whatever changes you want.

I was able to use dotNETs suggestions and edit the vdproj file. Simply adding a character and removing didn't work, but making an actual edit did. Doing so triggered the check out for GIT. In my case I was attempting to change one of the Detected Dependencies exclude property to false and was able to do so while editing the vdproj file. Once I saved it then reopened Visual Studio the check was displayed on my installer and the change was already applied. I was able to make additional changes while checked out.
Once finished and I checked it in, I could no longer edit and needed to manually edit the file again to check out.

Excluding Files from TFS Server Workspace

We just implemented TFS in our company and I accidentaly included the bin and obj folders. I would like to exclude them. I searched on Google and found basically 2 ways to accomplish this:
1) https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/66tw9ezk(v=vs.90).aspx
In Visual Studio, open Solution Explorer and select the file to exclude.
On the File menu, click Source Control, then click Exclude from Source Control.
When you are ready to place the file under source control, you can access the File menu and click Source Control, then uncheck Exclude from Source Control.
In my File>Source Control, I don't see exclude from source control there or under advanced.
2) How do I permanently exclude the bin and obj folders from TFS 2012 checkin?
I tried adding a .tfignore and I couldn't find the 'ignore by extension', 'ignore file', etc. in teh Promote Candidate Changes dialog box. As far as I understand this is only applies to a local workspace and not a server workspace.
We set up the solution to checkout a file whenever it's altered, so when someone builds the project he acquires an exclusive lock on the dlls and then nobody else is able to compile.

After the steps Mike describes, you can go further and define an ignore rule. Undo the pending changes to the file you want to exclude and then click the "detected: 123" link that shows under "Excluded changes".
This open up a new window in which you can ignore these changes indefinitely. It does this by creating a .tfignore file and adding that to source control. The alternative to the UI is t create this file manually and checking it in. This should prevent Team Explorer from showing files that match the patterns in the ignore file.
Make sure that these files are deleted from source control, if they were checked in accidentally, you can destroy them to make sure they are truly gone. You'll need to do this from the commandline using tf destroy
The call to Destroy won't delete your local files when you use the remote itemspec to destroy them:
C:\>tf destroy /collection:http:
//jessehouwing:8080/tfs/DefaultCollection $/Scrum/test.txt.txt /noprompt
Destroyed: $/Scrum/test.txt.txt
C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 14.0>dir "c:\Workspaces\Local\Scrum"
Volume in drive C has no label.
Volume Serial Number is 008A-AC5B
Directory of c:\users\jhouw\Source\Workspaces\Local\Scrum
12-08-2015 20:12 <DIR> .
12-08-2015 20:12 <DIR> ..
12-08-2015 20:12 0 test.txt.txt
1 File(s) 0 bytes
2 Dir(s) 297.229.512.704 bytes free
After performing a tf get /collection:http:
//jessehouwing:8080/tfs/DefaultCollection $/Scrum /recursive it will indeed be deleted. This should not be an issue if the files in question are regenerated during the next build.
See also:
https://stackoverflow.com/a/21260759/736079
If you're using a server workspace, the only way I can think of is to set a Forbidden Path checkin policy for your source control repo. It's a part of the Team Foundation Server Power Tools; you'd need to install the version of the power tools that matches your Visual Studio version on all developers' machines.
Note: these use Regular Expressions, so you'll need to adjust your pattern to match ;).

From my personal experience, the easiest way to achieve this is the following:
View -> Team Explorer (Ctrl+\, Ctrl+M)
Click on Pending Changes
In your Included Changes list, right click on the desired folder.
Click Exclude.
The excluded change should now appear in the Excluded Changes list below.

Visual Studio compiles fine, but it still shows red lines

I am using Visual Studio 2012 and it was working all fine until I started observing some funny behavior. When I open my code it shows red Underlines which we usually see when there is an error in our code. Surprisingly, the code compiles all fine. I have made following observations that are not normal at all.
Red underlines in the code
While cleaning or building the solution no error.
Red underlines go away for some time after I build/clean the solution, but they come back eventually.
Because of this, my IntelliSense stopped working.
I can not right click on any component and go to its definition.
Any ideas?

Visual Studio 2017, Visual Studio 2019, Visual Studio 2022:
Closing Visual Studio and removing the .vs folder located in the solution directory worked for my C# projects.
This folder has a hidden attribute. You may need to change View settings to show hidden files in File Explorer.

Delete the contents of the temporary ASP.NET folder and then rebuild. It'll either be in your user folder (for IIS Express - \AppData\Local\Temp\Temporary ASP.NET Files) or the Windows directory (for IIS - C:\Windows\Microsoft.Net\Framework\vx.xx\Temporary ASP.NET Files)
Paths are off the top of my head and may not be correct

For me, this issue got fixed when I unloaded and reloaded the project again.

I had this issue and it was related to ReSharper.
Solution steps for me:
Disable ReSharper
VisualStudio\Tools\Options\ReSharper Ultimate\General\Suspend Now
Build Solution
(Ctrl + Shift + B)
Re-enable ReSharper
VisualStudio\Tools\Options\ReSharper Ultimate\General\Resume Now

Just had this problem while working with a solution created in Visual Studio 2012 but running in 2013. I closed Visual Studio, deleted all \bin and \obj directories and the problem was gone.

I had this problem after resolving some conflicts from Subversion (SVN). The solution has several projects in it and I resolved some conflicts in a few different projects. I did a menu Build → Clean Solution followed by a men Build → Rebuild Solution and everything was good again.

Do you have any plugins installed, like ReSharper? I had an issues with a bad plugin.
Try running Visual Studio in safe mode, to prevent plugins from running.
devenv /Safemode

If you are using ReSharper like me, you may delete ReSharper cache following by this link: Configure Caches
To specify the location for caches:
Open the Environment → General page of ReSharper options.
Use the Save solution caches in to select the location for cache files:
User local settings folder to store them in the following directory: %LOCALAPPDATA%\JetBrains\Transient
4.System TEMP folder to store them in the following directory: %TEMP%\ReSharperCache
Solution folder to store them in the root folder of the current solution
Custom folder to choose a custom location for ReSharper cache files.
Click Save to apply the modifications and let ReSharper choose where to save them, or save the modifications to a specific settings layer using the Save To drop-down list. For more information, see managing and sharing ReSharper settings.
Reopen your solution for the changes to take effect.

What works for me is deleting the IntelliSense indexfile.
The IntelliSense-file is in the same directory as you solution.
It's filename is SolutionName.sdf
Just delete this file, open you solution again, and IntelliSense will start rebuilding its indexfile. After that the problem will be gone.

In Visual Studio 2013 I solved this problem by deleting all of my obj and bin folders across all projects. The issue was probably due to solution configurations that I had deleted, but I hadn't been cleaned up properly, as doing a menu Build → Clean Solution doesn't remove the old outputs from the obj and bin folders.

This worked for me in Visual Studio Enterprise 2017:
Navigate to Tools > Options > Text Editor > JavaSCript/TypeScript > Linting > General
deselect "Enable ESLint"

I've run into this as well and was able to return Visual Studio to its normal state by doing the following -
Identify the project where the red lined code comes from
Remove the "red line" project from the references where it is being used (ProjectName\References - right click, add references, and uncheck the "red line" project)
Build (you should get errors now)
Readd the project reference that was just removed
Build again
The red lines should be removed and the project should build!

Steps that work
Open the solution and do a rebuild all
Close the solution
Open solution and do a clean
Close solution
Open solution and do a rebuild all
Close and then open the solution. It should be good. This works for me every time
Be careful deleting some of these settings files as you will lose saved debug settings, etc. And it may do more damage than you realize.

I have found recently it is easy to solve this by switching from Debug to Release in the dropdown to left of the Play Button. Then switching back from Release to Debug.

I had the same problem with lots of red lines in several *cpp source files. Though the code compiled perfectly. None of the other solutions worked for me.
Changing the order of #include lines of a *.cpp-file could make the red lines disappear - and reappear with the restored order.
Then I noticed a header file was included twice in a single *.cpp file. I removed the second one and - everything was fine.
Including a header file twice in the same *.cpp file seems to be no problem to the compiler but to the IntelliSense part.

Simply refresh the project/solution. It will get resolved.

I ran into this problem with the latest Visual Studio 2017.
Also the debug version of my program was running painfully slow.
I deleted the Solution file .sln and created a new one.

I had a similar problem when I was seeing lot of red squiggles in a couple of files. I tried all answers proposed previously, but nothing seemed to work.
The moment I started browsing through the classes, structures in other files for which complaining files had references, the problem disappeared. It seemed IntelliSense was not able to resolve dependencies on its own for some reason.

For me, I had at one time enabled fusion logging to debug some assembly dependency errors (fuslogvw from a CMD prompt). That was months ago and I had been experiencing much slower build times (5-7 minutes) since then.
I had also forgotten entirely that I had left them enabled. These logs were my bottleneck and disabling them has made iterating much faster.

In my case with Visual Studio 2017, I have many "red lines" shown below all symbols defined in a third-party library, but my project can actually build without problems. I have tried all suggested solutions (like delete the .VS folder, restart Visual Studio, etc.), but none of them working.
Finally, I fixed it and this is how: I open my application project's property page, then go to C/C++ → General → Additional Include Directories, which is the place I put all needed third-party library header paths.
I delete all the path (but save them somewhere), click "Ok" to confirm. Then I come back to the same setting, paste those paths back, click "Ok" to confirm, and then all those "red lines" disappear.

I have VS2019 with ReSharper, and ran into this issue.
What worked for me was:
Go to the ReSharper >> Options menu
Go to the General tab (should be the default)
Press the "Clear caches" button
Close all instances of Visual Studio (2019)
Restart Visual Studio

Using VS2022 without Resharper when this problem occurred, tried several things, this did help me in the end:
Close Visual Studio
Delete folder .vs in the Solution folder
Go to folder %USERPROFILE%\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\VisualStudio\
Delete all folders whose names start with 17.
Reopen Visual Studio
More specific subfolders could exist that might be enough to delete, but I had no issues after deleting all of it. AFAIK these only contains user session data, temporary files and/or cache files that can be downloaded again or recreated as needed.

Found this solution:
Close Visual Studio (ensure devenv.exe is not present in the Task Manager).
Delete the %USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\Microsoft\VisualStudio\xx\ComponentModelCache directory.
Restart Visual Studio.

I have had this problem for months and have finally fixed it. Closing Visual Studio and removing the .vs folder located in the solution directory did not work for me.
There was an assemblyIdentity tag in the web.config file which was referencing a library that was not in my references folder. I removed this tag, cleaned, closed and reopened, and the problem was fixed.
Check each of the assemblyIdentity tags in your web.config file and check them against the references folder in solution explorer
Remove any assemblyIdentity tags, including the parent dependentAssembly tag for any which aren't listed in your references folder.
Clean the solution
Close and reopen the solution

Deleting .vs folder did the trick for me.

for me this works:-
Open the Command Palette ctrl+⇧+p
Then type: reload Window.

Deleting all the folders which start with "asp.xxx" worked for me. You can reach these folders by:
(C:\Windows\Microsoft.Net\Framework\vx.xx\Temporary ASP.NET Files)

Hover over the word that has the red underline squibble. A mini dialog box will appear. Click on 'Quick fix' and then click on 'Disable error squibble'.

InstallShield: cannot extract icon with index 0 (for dummies)

Yes I did my homework first. And I'm still stuck. First let me express my irritation at Microsoft for deprecating the Installer project type. Shame on them.
Back to my issue, Here is the error:
Error 3 -3204: Cannot extract icon with index 0 from file <some_path>\obj\Debug\MyProject.Gui.exe.
Attempt #1: InstallShield: cannot extract icon with index 0 vb.net
-- The answer says to include an object of type icon in my exe and rebuild. To do this, I tried the following:
right clicked on my windows forms project, add new item, icon, save all
open the icon file in step 1, draw some text in it, save all
right click the project and select rebuild (no errors, looks good)
left click on 'Specify Application Data'->'Files', select the *.ico in the project (Note: I can see it clearly listed, and it appears in the dialog as index0)
left click on 'General Information'-> 'Display Icon' -> browse for the *.ico (located in project folder for MyProject.Gui.exe)
save all and rebuild all
...I still get the same error message.
How does one "Recompile your EXE to include an icon and the message will go away"?

I had the same issue. Your problem is because you need to embed the icon into your executable. The way you do this is in Project Properties window in Visual Studio (Alt-Enter or right click ->properties for project root in solution explorer).
In the project properties under Application, there's a group box called Resources. Add your icon as shown below and install shield will build fine.
Hope that helps.

I was getting this problem, I try a lot of solutions on the web, but the only way that works for me:
Expand the deploy solution (+) on the right panel (Solution Explorer)
Expand the menu "Configure the target system"
Double click on Shortcuts folder
Here you will find 2 output you set up in the project wizard.
Select one of them, and find the property Icon, click to (...) to browse the propertly icon.
Do the same with the second one output built solution.
Rebuild your project!
Regards,

You need to copy the icon file to the debug folder of your windows application to successfully compile.

Go to Shortcuts/Folders under configure the Target System.
Select your application from the tree.
Select the icon and change the index to 2 (or something other than 0)
Build it.

If the problem is that you associated the icon with the installer and you embedded it into your application but you are still getting this error, try adding a folder exception to your antivirus software. The exception should be the folder where your source is located and the executable is output.
The symptom is that you randomly get this error during a build. It is caused by your antivirus software preventing the installshield icon extractor from accessing your application executable.

This happened with me also. My application runs in the background so I didn't create an Icon for it. When this error occurred I assigned an icon and everything built okay.

Unable to access 'Build Action' property for .cs files

i got a problem with my site with my app_code files and a lot of question ive read people say you need to change the proprties of the .cs files to Build Action.
by right clicking the .cs files and press proprties.
but...
when i right clicking the files i cant see any option called proprties so i press F4 and it open a proprties window and i just click on the .cs file and still cant see any option i can change somthing to Build Action.
any idea why i cant see this options?
EDIT:
my problem is that when i get in the file proprties i have only 2 options...
thay are called:
1.Full Name
2.Full Path
EDIT2:
here what i see in visual studio 2010 when i try access the protrtie menu/window
http://img338.imageshack.us/img338/2359/blac.png

As Microsoft points out in the article "Web Application Projects versus Web Site Projects":
Web application projects use Visual Studio project files (.csproj or
.vbproj) to keep track of information about the project. Among other
tasks, this makes it possible to specify which files are included in
or excluded from the project, and therefore which files are compiled
during a build.
An answer to a similiar question at CodeProject's forums reveals a hint. Abstract:
[...] Looks like you are working on a web application that is actually a
Website as per Visual Studio. You would need to create a new Web Application
and probably copy over the source files there. [...]
http://www.codeproject.com/Questions/173637/Setting-Build-Action-for-Files-in-App_Data

Have you tried this:

You say you haven't got the option being suggested by other posters.
If this is the case, than it is quite possible that your Visual Studio settings are corrupt; this can give rise to all sorts of odd behaviour.
I would suggest you reset your settings, but please be aware you will lose any custom IDE settings that you've previously applied.
Try this:
In Visual Studio, go to Tools->Import and Export Settings
Choose "Reset All Settings" and click Next
Choose to save your current settings if you wish, or select "no" and then click next.
Choose the collection of settings( he IDE preset) you want, probably "Visual C# Development Settings"
Visual Studio will now revert all settings. Hopefully this will make the Build Action reappear.
[EDIT]
It might be worth trying safe mode too.
To do this, start up a "Visual Studio Command Prompt" from your start menu/programs list in Windows, and start Visual Studio with
devenv.exe /SafeMode
Does this make the options appear?

You can copy the file from Windows Explorer and paste it in the Solution Explorer. It will replace (or do nothing but incorporating it in the proj file) the file and recognize it as C#.

Normally you should see a Property named "Build Action" in the first line of the Property Window. This property should be set to "Compile".

Please select file and right click on it so that you will get following screen
Than click on the Properties you will get following screen
You can find build option in as a first option.