Error: The project type is not supported by this installation

Question

I'm trying to open a silverlight project in Visual Studio 2008 and getting this error.

The project type is not supported by this installation.

Let me tell you I did installed:

1. VS2008
2. SP1
3. Silverlight Tools 3
4. Silverlight SDK
5. Silverlight

And they were installed in the sequence they are mentioned here. Still I'm getting the same error.

Adding some more details which might be helpful in identifying the cause: When I try to create a new silverlight project it gives me error "Object reference not set to an instance of an object". And shows "...project creation failed."

I tried unistalling all of the things and installing them again. It really took a lot of time but didn't solved my problem.

Any help appreciated.

Impunity

Answer 1

I've had the same error when I tried to open a solution which required VB.NET, despite everything (to my knowledge) being C#.

If you've done a full install of VS then try this solution: http://andrewgunn.blogspot.com/2008/03/silverlight-project-type-is-not.html

Let us know how it goes.

Saveall

Had same problem today while trying to mantain old software... This didn't solve the issue (project still refused to load), manually editing the .csproj file as suggested by @Cowgirl did the trick instead. – Jepum

@alex - I'm not sure that's really worthy of a downvote considering it did solve the OP's question, but that's entirely up to you! – Saveall

Answer 2

Open the project.csproj file with another editor, delete whatever you find between

<ProjectTypeGuids></ProjectTypeGuids>

Cowgirl

This at least provided a more useful error message; in my case, that the errant project file was for a Windows Phone 7 project. There's no "devenv" in the directory mentioned in Andrew Gunn's blog. – Rosenkranz

Answer 3

Do you know who the silverlight project was created by? If so, then contact them and ask them if they used VS 2008 or if they used VS 2010 beta 1/2 (VS 2010 has a lot more and better support for silverlight so it's probable)

If they used VS 2010, then just go to the microsoft website and download you a copy... it's free(right now)

(and if you'll be doing much silverlight development, I'd recommend downloading it anyway. It has code completion for XAML!)

Norseman

Dude..the problem is I'm not able to even create a new silverlight project... And about the existing project...I did opened it in my VS 2008 before the 90 days trial period ran out. I unistalled VS2008 and re-installed and since then I'm not able to open this project. – Impunity

You didn't say that in your question. and I have no idea then. – Norseman

Answer 4

run devenv /setup

Peen