Solution Explorer Folders Disappear

Question

_{Saturday, January 7, 2012 9:23 AM}

Visual Studio 2010 Premium SP1, Windows 7 Professional SP1

I'm not sure where to post this but all my folders in my Solution Explorer have disappeared except Debug and 'res'. I can't imagine what could have happened. I did have an odd error a couple of hours ago when I was creating a menu item in the Resource Editor. For some reason it gave me an error message on a menu item that I had created. I went to the generated code and didn't see anything wrong on the line it referenced. I deleted the line anyway, went back to the resource editor and recreated the menu item. Everything was fine after that.

I opened another solution that I had created previously and it has all it's folders. Any ideas on how I can get my folders back or what could have caused it? Thanks.

EDIT: I'm using MFC.

EDIT2: I got to thinking that the error that I referred to above was actually worse than I probably reflected. It actually at one point crashed Visual Studio and I got one of those boxes that said, "Checking for a solution...". Then another larger box came up that said, "We apologize for the inconvenience..." and informed me that Visual Studio had to restart would I like it to try and save a couple of items. I said yes, and then it restarted. The program I writing is running ok, just the folders are missing.

All replies (2)

_{Monday, January 9, 2012 6:01 AM ✅Answered}

Hi haydnguy,

Welcome to MSDN forum.

I can see that you can’t find some of your folders on your solution explorer. May i ask some questions:

1. Does this happens on other projects?

2. Does your folders or files exist on your hard drive?(Which means your files are just removed from your Solution Explorer. )

If this happens on all your projects. You may try these steps to reset your Visual Studio:

1) Open Visual Studio Command Prompt (2010) under Start menu -> All Programs ->Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 ->Visual Studio Tools (run it with Administrator privilege: right-click the program -> Run as administrator);

2) Try some devenv switches in command prompt:

a. Rundevenv /Resetsettings to eliminate the cause of corrupted settings.

b. Rundevenv /ResetSkipPkgs in Command Prompt.

c. Rundevenv /Safemode to see if you can apply it correctly. This can eliminate the possibility that third party Add-ins or packages are causing problems.

3) Reboot the machine in Safe Mode. This can isolate some third party application/driver's interference.

4) Switch and try a new user account. This can rule out the possibility of corrupted user profile.

If this only happens on this project , you can try:

1)    Add your files to your solution explorer by Add>>Existing Item

2)    Create a new project and copy your files to that project.

If all my steps can’t not help you. Could you please try running devenv.exe /log <log path> in Command Prompt, the log files will be generated in the <log path>. Then you can check and analyze the log file to see if there are anything incorrect. After that, you can also post your log file to  a public site, like SkyDrive, and post the link here so that I can help you.

Hope this can help you.

Best regards,

Barry Wang [MSFT]
MSDN Community Support | Feedback to us

_{Monday, January 9, 2012 5:18 PM}

Hi Barry, thanks for responding.
 
I'll answer your questions in the order given.
 

1. No this does not happen in other projects. This is the first time it has happened.
2. I am not sure exactly what the folder layout is supposed to be in Windows Explorer, but the folders and files in this project appear exactly as other solutions that do not have this problem.
    I will create a new project and do the "file copy" as you suggest. Thanks so much for your help.
   ~hg~