Error: The application which this project type is based on was not found

Question

I installed VS2012 and tried to open a project that was developed using VS2012 as well by another developer. But I am getting an error message as below. I googled the error message and found most of MVC projects have same problem and found solutions to those. But mine isn't a MVC project. The original developer said it is a Light Switch and Entity Framework project. How can I start trouble shooting to find out what I am missing on my computer and to solve this problem?

Answer 1

The error message indicates that the extension of your project is .ls3proj, which is the extension that Visual Studio Lightswitch uses.

Make sure that when you install Visual Studio 2012 (or when you change/repair), that this product is selected.

Answer 2

This just happened to me too. I was missing "Microsoft SQL Server Data Tools - Business Intelligence for Visual Studio 2013". Once I downloaded that, I had additional Business Intelligence Project types when going to File -> New -> Project that I didn't have before, and I was able to open the Solution.

So maybe compare the project types you and your developer friend have listed when you go to File -> New -> Project.