So much for the hiatus. Frequently when you’re working in a team environment using Visual Studio in general and Visual Studio 2008 for this specific example, you’ll start to get an error dialog when you open the solution file that says “Some of the properties associated with the solution could not be read”. This isn’t a huge problem but it is a medium level annoyance as far as I’m concerned. It got to be a scratchy enough annoyance this morning so I decided to ask God for the answer. As is the case in 98% of the technological problems out there, God knew the answer.
As it turns out, this comes from a corrupted solution file. Specifically in this instance, it comes from having two “GlobalSection(TeamFoundationVersionControl) = preSolution” blocks in the solution file (I’d normally make a comment about TFS at this point but in my new happy, non-caustic personality, I’m refraining and only making a subtle, snide comment referring to what I’d usually do, something my more astute readers will probably read as veiled caustic-ness wrapped in false sincerity. Whatever). To get rid of the problem, just delete the second section and magically, the dialog doesn’t pop up.
I’m not sure how two identical global sections related to Team Foundation Version Control could get into the solution file but I’ll leave that as an exercise for the reader. Next time it happens to us, I’ll dig into it a little.