"the project type is not supported by this installation" error

Question

I have installed VS 2008 SP1 on W2k3 OS. After I installed ASP.NET MVC beta and tried creating ASP.NET MVC type project I get the following error.

"the project type is not supported by this installation"

Let me know if you have fixed this issue.

Answer 1

I was getting the same error and found this question in a Google search for the answer. Most answers unearthed in the search suggested that old project types were being moved onto a machine with a different version of Visual Studio installed. None of which applied to me.

I've got VS2008 installed on a machine (running 64bit Vista) at work and recently installed the ASP.NET MVC beta, without any problems.

I wanted to replicate my work environment on my Mac, so I installed VS2008 with the ASP.NET MVC beta into a WinXp installation running within a Parallels VM. When I went to create a project with the ASP.NET MVC Web Application template I got the "the project type is not supported by this installation" error.

I finally got things working by yet another reinstall of VS2008 (a clean install, not a repair). This time I choose the default installation options, rather than customising things as I usually do. I normally deselect VB, the mobile device, office and other non C# development stuff - I don't have much free space on my Mac.

After the clean install of VS2008 I did a windows update, installed VS2008 SP1 and finally installed the ASP.NET MVC beta.

It seems that when I customised the VS2008 install, I deselected something essential for the correct operation of the MVC beta. I don't have clue what that something is, I'm just happy that after three days I can play the the MVC stuff at home.

Its been a month since you posted the question. Have you made any progress since?

Answer 2

i installed visual web developer from the Visual studio 2008 installation dvd and that fixed the problem

Answer 3

I came across something while having issues of my own.

In short, try:

• Run the Visual Studio Command Prompt as Admin.

• Execute:

  devenv /setup
  

It then whirs away for a bit (VS2008 will not open), once the prompt returns fire up VS and all (may) be back to normal.

I came across this when my MVC projects got messed up when trying to get the Entity Framework up and running :)

Answer 4

Tried to install ASP.NET MVC 1.0. It works to me.

Answer 5

ewalshe - same thing worked for me. I know this is an old post, just wanted to put this out there for anybody else. I had an existing solution in source control (Vault), and wanted to set up my home computer for development. I installed Visual Studio 2008 at home without the following options:

C++
Visual Basic
Visual Web Developer

When I pulled down the solution from source control, all projects loaded EXCEPT my web project - VS simply did not recognize it. A fresh installation using the default options and a restart fixed my problem. I do not have the time nor the desire to really figure out which of the above is necessary for Web Application projects to work... maybe somebody will chime in.

~ryan

Answer 6

I had to rebuild my development VM to solve this one. Clean install FTW.

Answer 7

This is sometimes caused by running a version of Visual Studio which doesn't support MSTest.

Answer 8

Tried @ryan and @Rob Cooper answers with no joy. Running this in a vhd on Win7.

Zoned in on Mvc and that's where problem lies. Not 100% but think issue is that I was trying to open a project that didn't have latest Mvc release, which new build had.

Temporary solution is to rollback to previous version of Mvc. Then when that's happy, upgrade project to latest Mvc and then machine.

Answer 9

I tried some of the above solutions but still no joy. Finally I replaced the ProjectTypeGuids to this one below in the project file and it loaded fine

<ProjectTypeGuids>{349c5851-65df-11da-9384-00065b846f21};{fae04ec0-301f-11d3-bf4b-00c04f79efbc}</ProjectTypeGuids>

Answer 10

This might be obvious, but it fixed it for me. I had installed ASP.NET MVC prior to installing Visual Studio 2008. Once I removed MVC and reinstalled, I no longer had the problem.

Answer 11

Vivek's suggestion of swapping the project type GUID worked for me.

I also had to update the version of System.Web.MVC for the project to work.

Answer 12

Ran into this problem when I had VS2008 running by accident when I started the ASP.NET MVC install. Closed VS, uninstalled ASP.NET MVC, then reinstalled it and everything worked fine.

Answer 13

install ASP.NET MVC 1.0. It works to me.

Answer 14

I had the same problem with MVC v1. Turns out that I hadn't installed the "Visual Web Developer" feature.

This SO user had the same issue.

Answer 15

In Windows 7 if you are not running as the local "Administrator" and have UAC turned on the install will silently fail. The solution is to disable UAC, reboot, and the install should succeed.

Answer 16

The problem is that MVC 2 is not completely backward compatible. Visual Studio cannot open MVC 1 apps without MVC 1 installed. So if you just install MVC 1, which can install together with MVC 2 you should be just fine. http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=53289097-73ce-43bf-b6a6-35e00103cb4b

Answer 17

I had installed VS 2008 trial version (90 days), changing "ProjectTypeGuids" in .csproj file worked like a charm! Thanks.

Answer 18

Installed VS2008 + vs sp1 and was recieving: "the project type is not supported" error

Installing MVC 1.0 solved the problem (http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=53289097-73ce-43bf-b6a6-35e00103cb4b)

+1 Mr White

Answer 19

Thank you guys for helping me solve my problem!

Had the same "the project type is not supported by this installation" problem with Visual Studio 2010, trying to open a Web Application Project.

ProjectTypeGuids in project file: {349c5851-65df-11da-9384-00065b846f21};{fae04ec0-301f-11d3-bf4b-00c04f79efbc}

I only needed to include "Visual Web Developer" feature in the istallation to fix the problem.