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.

Answer 1

Hi there, 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.

Answer 2

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!)

Answer 3

run devenv /setup