Roslyn: Cannot open projects in the Roslyn solution in VS2015 with Update 2

[adamralph]

Version Used:
A fresh installation of "Visual Studio Enterprise 2015 with Update 2".

Steps to Reproduce:

1. Open Roslyn.sln

Expected Behavior:

The solution and all its projects are loaded.

Actual Behavior:
Most of the projects are not loaded. If I right click -> "Reload Project" on one of them, e.g. Scripting, I get:

If I click "Install", I get the VS setup dialog, but, unsurprisingly, I have no option to install Update 1 because I'm already on Update 2.

[Pilchie]

I believe @rchande was already looking at this, but in our experience if you pick Skip, and then when the solution has finished loading, manually go find the project and choose to reload in the Solution Explorer context menu, then it _does_ load successfully.

We haven't figured out the root cause yet though :-(

[adamralph]

@Pilchie I found the cause. It was because I didn't have the VS SDK installed. I added it via the VS setup dialog and now all the projects load successfully.

So, the dialog regarding Update 1 is extremely misleading. I guess you may want to document this somewhere to prevent more people tripping over like I did.

I'll leave this issue open in case you want to use it track documentation of this. Feel free to close it otherwise.

[adamralph]

BTW - I already was loading the project manually. I guess the problem you are referring to is something else.

[jaredpar]

The underlying issue here turned out to be the lack of the VS SDK being installed. @Pilchie do we have a bug on the VS team to have a clearer error message here?

[davkean]

This bug is a portable bug, we basically register a query that runs after a project has failed to open, that causes this dialog to show - that query thinks that "Update 1" isn't installed, when clearly it is implicitly installed by Update 2.

[davkean]

Without that query, the project would have failed to load with an error about missing targets.

[adamralph]

It sounds like the error about missing targets would be much more helpful. Presumably it would contain some clue to the VS SDK being absent.

[davkean]

Absolutely, it's a mistake that this dialog is showing - the check for Update 1 is supposed to succeed, and hence it shouldn't kick in.

[adamjcook]

Actually, in my case, I have the Visual Studio Extensibility Tools installed (always had them) and I cannot load this solution. See below.

Attempting to reload the "Rolsyn" project (among many others) yields the following message:

It seems that it is missing this NuGet package (https://www.nuget.org/packages/Microsoft.VSSDK.BuildTools/) but I cannot really install it because solution-level Visual Studio NuGet installations are not supported in Visual Studio 2015 and onward.

If I attempt to "Install Missing Feature(s)", I receive the same "Update 1" dialog as it described above. As mentioned before, I am on Update 2.

This is probably the same effect that everyone is seeing in this issue, but in my case, installing the Visual Studio SDK seems to not be enough. Perhaps I will try and repair my Visual Studio install.

[Pilchie]

@adamjcook - can you run the Restore.cmd script in the root of the repo? We have a couple of extra project.json files that we rely on being restored that don't happen if you restore just the solution file.

See https://github.com/dotnet/roslyn/blob/master/docs/contributing/Building%2C%20Debugging%2C%20and%20Testing%20on%20Windows.md.

[adamjcook]

@Pilchie Yes, sir. This fixes my issue. Looks like I did not drill down into the documentation enough. Thank you.

[kedarkolhatkar]

Please follow instructions on this page. Building, Debugging, and Testing on Windows

[Shiko1st]

I've made everything as in the document, but it doesn't help.
Restore.cmd returns this:

Property 'PositionalBinding' cannot be found for type 'System.Management.Automation.CmdletBindingAttribute'.
At E:\projects\roslyn\build\scripts\build.ps1:17 char:15
+ [CmdletBinding <<<< (PositionalBinding=$false)]
    + CategoryInfo          : InvalidOperation: (:) [], ParentContainsErrorRecordException
    + FullyQualifiedErrorId : PropertyAssignmentException

I have VS Community 2017 15.3.3 and all workloads installed, including .net core 2.

[jaredpar]

@Shiko1st what OS are you running?

[Shiko1st]

@jaredpar Win7, all updates up to May 2017

[jaredpar]

That is the issue. Win7 uses an old version of powershell that we dont support for development. Need to use a newer version (3 or higher)

[jasonmalinowski]

@jaredpar Is it upgradable, or is Windows 7 not supported at all? Do we need to document the requirement now?

[jaredpar]

iirc it is upgradable

[jasonmalinowski]

@Shiko1st I guess you can get the download links from https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/scripting/setup/installing-windows-powershell? Maybe try a newer version there?

[Shiko1st]

Thank you, new version was installed and code were successfully built!

[jasonmalinowski]

Since this wasn't the first time we've had this question: #22178 is out to formally state the requirement.