Last night I opened an ASP.NET MVC project in Visual Studio 2013 that was originally created in Visual Studio 2010 and found that 4 of the six projects in the solution were not loading. This solution was working in VS 2012 earlier so I was wondering what went wrong!

After goofing around I found the Output Window (the Window menu has been split up and moved around in VS2013 – It’s at Debug->Windows->Output; Who moved my cheese!!!). On selecting Solution from the ‘Show output from’ dropdown, I saw one such error for each project that was not loaded:

C:\Users\SKM\Documents\My Projects\[redacted].csproj : error  : The imported project "C:\Users\SKM\Documents\My Projects\[redacted]\.nuget\nuget.targets" was not found. Confirm that the path in the declaration is correct, and that the file exists on disk.  C:\Users\SKM\Documents\My Projects\[redacted].csproj

That’s when it struck me the code dump was created using the Visual Studio Extension SolZip, which excludes the .nuget folder and thus Nuget Package Restore was failing. So the fix was easy:

1. Right click on Solution
2. Enable Nuget Package Restore
3. Reload each project or save->close->and re-open solution
4. Restore Packages from Nuget and you are done!

This is more of a reminder for myself!