denis bider

Various thoughts

VS 2015 projects: "One or more errors occurred"

Posted Jul 29, 2015 at 02:19 by denisbider

Last edited Jul 29, 2015 at 02:27 by denisbider

cpp programming Visual Studio

For the most part, I find that Visual Studio 2015 is awesome. However, it did ship with kinks that need to be worked out. Not least, it has crashed on me from time to time, while working on a large solution.

I recently experienced a problem where I couldn't open Visual C++ projects (.vcxproj) after I copied them to another location. When trying to open the projects, VS 2015 would give me nothing more than this "extremely useful" error:

That is some talent, right there. That must have taken a lot of work to get this right.

After trying various things, and having researched this without success for a few hours, I finally got the idea to try opening the projects in Visual Studio 2013, instead.

Behold: VS 2013 actually displayed a useful error, which informed me that my projects had Import dependencies that I forgot to move.

So, yeah. If VS 2015 helpfully tells you that "one or more errors occurred" — try VS 2013.

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Showing 5 out of 5 comments, oldest first:

Comment on Aug 3, 2015 at 17:27 by Unknown

Thanks for this. I got the same extremely unhelpful error and was also able to fix it by opening the project in VS2013. For me the cause was different: a set of build customizations that was installed in VS2013 but not VS2015 (found under Build Dependencies -> Build Customizations in the project menu). This caused the project to open without issue in VS2013 but not in 2015. I fixed the problem by copying the associated .targets, .props, and .xml files for the build customization from C:\Program Files (x86)\MSBuild\Microsoft.Cpp\v4.0\V120\BuildCustomizations to the corresponding V140 version of the folder. Hope this helps for anyone else who gets this error.

Comment on Aug 4, 2015 at 01:28 by denisbider

I'm very glad it helped! Thanks for sharing. :-)

Comment on Aug 21, 2015 at 06:46 by Patrick

Thanks for this tip - mine turned out to be a missing User.props file.

Comment on Nov 23, 2015 at 08:09 by familyman

@Shoa: Gr8 tip. Mine was due to missing *.targets or *.xml files

Comment on Apr 1, 2016 at 10:57 by Krishnaraj Barvathaya B

I too bumped into same issue when opened the solution from VS 2015 and as you mentioned, got more details when I opened the solution from VS 2013. Thank you for your tip.