Unable to edit Orchard CMS site in Visual Studio 2012

Question

I'm trying to create a site using Orchard CMS. To get started, I downloaded / installed Orchard from WebMatrix. I successfully setup a site using the "Default" recipe. I then click the "Files" tab within the accordian along the left side. From here, I can see all of the files in my project. To begin editing within Visual Studio 2012, I click the "Visual Studio" button in the ribbon.

Once inside Visual Studio, I right-click on the solution and select "Rebuild Solution". The solution begins building, but then I receive an error. The error says:

Error 1 Object reference not set to an instance of an object. C:\Users\username\Documents\My Web Sites\Orchard CMS2\Modules\Contrib.Cache\Contrib.Cache.csproj 1

Please note that at this point, I have not even edited a single file. Rather, I created a basic site and attempted to open it in Visual Studio. What am I doing wrong?

Hodden

Have you tried building from source? Clone the Mercurial repository from orchard.codeplex.com and just open the Orchard.sln file. That will work better if you are going to edit code. – Kalsomine

Answer 1

Only the full source code will build in Visual Studio. You can edit the compiled web site version that you downloaded in Visual Studio, but you won't be able to build it. It actually doesn't need building as it has dynamic compilation built-in.

If you want to build the framework and core, get the full source code version.

Panorama

For details, see What file to download? in the version 1.6 release notes. – Paapanen