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I'm not sure why, but Visual Studio is not showing all the projects in my solution. I need them to show so I can set as default project under solution explorer. I'm not seeing a fix for this issue in a general internet search. The closest I see is VS not showing files folders, but this is different than my issue. Hopefully there is an easy way to fix it, without adding things again piecemeal. My co-workers can see their complete set of projects in solution explorer so it must be a corruption in my workspace.

Community
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Michele
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    close the solution and open it again. Or try "Add existing project"... – Legends Jan 20 '17 at 21:00
  • Closing and opening the solution didn't fix it. I shouldn't have to add existing project, since it's supposed to be in there already. My old co-worker used to have a file that I could remove, but I don't have notes on it now. When I entered Visual Studio again, the file would be re-created by Visual Studio. – Michele Jan 23 '17 at 12:48
  • This is a little late to the party but I ran into a _similar problem with VS2019_ and thought I'd leave a note that the issue was in a path created by `git clone`. The source repo had "A name with banks" and the default directory name on the machine was thus "A%20name%20with%20blanks". Apparently VS2019 doesn't like URL escape chars in the folder path. After removing them everything worked fine. – Markus Deibel May 02 '19 at 07:58
  • This happened to me after pulling a change that added a new project to the solution. The project didn't appear at first. Restarting Visual Studio (2017) made the project appear. – Gustaf Liljegren May 24 '19 at 11:42
  • There appears to be some issue related to the use of .slnf files and this issue... Haven't pinned down the exact steps yet though – Hoppe Apr 29 '20 at 13:02

8 Answers8

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Open your ".sln" project file using Notepad. In this file you can observe listed projects like below

Project("{FAE04EC0-301F-11D3-BF4B-00C04F79EFBC}") = "test.myProject.Data", "test.myProject.Data\test.myProject.csproj", "{6D7F7B84-F3BD-4A19-A069-D144C345B887}"
EndProject

Please add if there any missing projects. If you have old back up or co-workers file, Just copy and paste missing projects to this file. In my case it works !!

Thinira
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close vs , delete .vs folder then open vs again. it works for me.

funbrain9
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I found that re-adding the existing project to the solution worked for me!

Jennifer
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I had to copy out changed files in my workspace, fix my permissions/ownership on my directory (it was no owner instead of me), re-do the mapped drive the workspace was on, re-do the shortcut to the Visual Studio project (even though it was supposed to theoretically be the same place I mapped), re-pull the project down, and copy my changes in again. At this point Visual Studio had the missing solutions in it again so I could set startup project and run the debugger. I'm not sure how the ownership/permissions got messed up. I think at one point the other office had a server go down, and maybe my permissions/ownership got mixed up then. I'm not sure why VS wasn't showing the missing projects, but it's fixed after doing the above.

Michele
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I had the same issue where my colleague saw 1 more project on his computer.

I deleted my .sln file and got the exact same version as he. Problem was still the same.

Solution was: I had an unloaded project. Apparently this is safed in a local user setting file (probably the .suo file). I looked for the unloaded project and loaded it again.

kabeleced
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  1. Close the VStudio entire project, go to the main project folder and click on the .sln file to load the entire project agian.
  2. go to solution explorer see which are having (unload), right click and load project with dependencies
  3. sometimes check if the project startup has changed, if changed just right click on the related project and set as project startup
suntosh aqula
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This .sln file structure breakdown offers a great insight on how projects are able to be found and populated into the project hierarchy. My .sln file had lost all its project persistence blocks and thus I had 0 projects under my solution. I copied the blocks from a a previous git commit and this fixed it. I still don't know why the blocks disappeared or the whole .sln file changed

Rachier Alal
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I had the same issue. After opening the Visual Studio in Administrator mode it started to work.

Search for VS->Right click-> "Run as administrator"

NKA
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