An Experiment in Scotch

So much for the hia­tus. Fre­quently when you’re work­ing in a team envi­ron­ment using Visual Stu­dio in gen­eral and Visual Stu­dio 2008 for this spe­cific exam­ple, you’ll start to get an error dia­log when you open the solu­tion file that says “Some of the prop­er­ties asso­ci­ated with the solu­tion could not be read”. This isn’t a huge prob­lem but it is a medium level annoy­ance as far as I’m con­cerned. It got to be a scratchy enough annoy­ance this morn­ing so I decided to ask God for the answer. As is the case in 98% of the tech­no­log­i­cal prob­lems out there, God knew the answer.

As it turns out, this comes from a cor­rupted solu­tion file. Specif­i­cally in this instance, it comes from hav­ing two “GlobalSection(TeamFoundationVersionControl) = preS­o­lu­tion” blocks in the solu­tion file (I’d nor­mally make a com­ment about TFS at this point but in my new happy, non-caustic per­son­al­ity, I’m refrain­ing and only mak­ing a sub­tle, snide com­ment refer­ring to what I’d usu­ally do, some­thing my more astute read­ers will prob­a­bly read as veiled caustic-ness wrapped in false sin­cer­ity. What­ever). To get rid of the prob­lem, just delete the sec­ond sec­tion and mag­i­cally, the dia­log doesn’t pop up.

I’m not sure how two iden­ti­cal global sec­tions related to Team Foun­da­tion Ver­sion Con­trol could get into the solu­tion file but I’ll leave that as an exer­cise for the reader. Next time it hap­pens to us, I’ll dig into it a little.