"Go To Definition" in Visual Studio only brings up the Metadata

I am working in a Web Project in Visual Studio 2008. When I hit F12 (or right-click and select Go To Definition) Visual Studio is consistently going to the Metadata file instead of going to the source.

Some Points:

• All the source code is C#, there is no VB.Net
• All the projects are in the same solution
• Everything is a project reference as opposed to a file reference (checked and double-checked)
• I have tried the Clean/Rebuild Solution approach (even to the point of clearing out the Temp directory, Temporary ASP.NET Files directory, etc).

Has anyone else seen this behavior and/or know how to fix it?

Well, another developer found the answer. The specific project we had an issue with was originally added as a file reference, then removed and added as a Project Reference. Visual Studio however, kept both in the csproj file for the web site, causing the issue. He went in and manually edited the csproj file to remove the file reference to the problem project and all is fixed now

It happens when you don't add reference as a project but point to a dll or exe using Browse tab in Add Reference dialog. If you add reference using Projects tab you should go directly to the source code when you select Go To Definition.

However, if you install ReSharper, you'll go to source code even if you added your reference to a dll/exe using Browse tab.

Looks like it needs to be setup in Resharper as well. My Visual Studio does not navigate to .NET Framework source code until I enable it in Resharper.

1. close your solution.

2. delete hidden <name of the solution>.suo file in folder where your solution's <name of the solution>.sln file exists.

3. open your solution.

4. rebuild your solution.

For those using VS 2017 (I'm at version 15.3.4 at this moment) here are the simple steps:

1. Open your solution in Windows Explorer and close down Visual Studio
2. In the explorer menu, select View and ensure that the "Hidden items" checkbox is marked
3. Navigate to the subfolder .vs\[your solution name]\v15
4. Delete the .suo file
5. Restart VS and build your solution

That fixed it for me: F12 opened the actual source file, not the "from metadata" version.

Visual studio often suffer from a problem of going to metadata rather than your project if you shift location where you are building the project, ie you may have several versions to test things out.

Simply delete the reference and immediately add it back and everything will be sorted out.

The marked solution does not always work. You must make sure that the referenced project GUID in the project files is the correct GUID for the project you are trying to reference. Visual Studio does allow them to get out of synch in some circumstances. You can get the project GUID from the project file with a text editor. So if project A reference project B. Open up project B.csproj in text editor, copy out project GUID from the tag. Then open up project A.csproj in text editor, and make sure that you are using the correct GUID. Search for project name "B" in this case. It should be at . Replace the GUID in the tag with the correct one. Save and reload. Of course also make sure file based references to your projects are removed. You only want project references.

I've kill all VS instances, deleted the SUO, launch sln and it worked for me...

Remove the reference dll, Build (will get errors), ADD THE reference (you removed) then build again ... F12 on your function should then work (worked for me).

#1

Check "View - Object Browser" and if you see more than one assembly with the same name - that's why your getting this error.

For us it was a bug in VS 2019:

If you have ASP.NET "Razor helpers" in App_Code folder the Visual Studio 2019 interprets that as a different assembly but with the same name, that hides the actual assembly.

There's no fix for that other than rewrite those helpers to partial views or HTML helpers (you will have to do that anyway if you plan migrating to .NET Core).

See this workaround on MS's site and please upvote the bug there so MS fixes it

https://developercommunity.visualstudio.com/solutions/1008795/view.html (please upvote)

#2

Another reason why same assembly can be loaded twice in the object browser is if you have a unit-test project that starts iis-express process and never kills it properly.

I figured out how to solve my problem from this post, maybe it will also work for some of you.

I followed these steps:

1. Close the solution.
2. Delete the intellisense database file for the solution: .ncb
3. Open the solution.
4. Rebuild the solution.

(I believe either step 3 or 4 regenerates the intellisense database file when it is missing)

Intellisense, "go to defintion" and "find all references" should be working again.

In my case, (using Visual Studio Professional 2015), when I had disabled the XAML designer, the F12 stopped working. As soon as I revert the changes, and restart Visual Studio, the F12 worked again.

Checked the pattern multiple times to confirm and then posted. Hope it helps someone.

Symptom:

Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate was repeatedly failing to find references to functions, #defines, includes, etc when using the "Go To Definition" or "Go To Declaration" or "Find All References" features - oddly Intellisense was working.

Fix:

1. Close Visual Studio
2. Delete (rename if you want to be conservative) the solution .sdf file
3. Reopen Visual Studio

The .sdf file will automatically be rebuilt by parsing the include files in your solution

For me, the GUID solution didn't work and I couldn't find my .ncb file. (Or maybe I'm lazy and didn't look hard enough, but that's not important.) Rebuilding and restarting visual studio didn't help either.

What I did was close visual studio and delete the .dll and .pdb being referenced in the top of the Meta Data file that my intellisense kept linking to. In my case it meant I deleted my .dll and it's .pdb file from Utilities/bin/Release. (Utilities is the name of the .dll project I was having issues with.) Then I restarted visual studio and rebuilt the .dll then the whole solution. No more problems!

Just found another cause. I upgraded my web project to 4.0 but left the class libraries at 2.0. At that point all the class libraries in my solution were treated as file references from my web project. Might help someone else...

I faced the same issue and one of colleagues gave me the following solution and it worked! If none of the above works for you,

1. Remove all the references and add them back (make sure the path is correct)
2. Go to Solution properties, and recheck the Project Dependencies of all projects. Make sure the project that you'll be using is added as a dependent in the project that you are working on.

I did all suggested steps but nothing has been changed then
finally right click and add reference menu, project tab

1. simply unselected the reference project.
2. save the solution.
3. select the same project.
4. Rebuild the solution.

Problem sorted. Hope this will help to some one.

Below steps worked for me.

1. Go to .csproj file

2. Open it in Notepad Go to line where dll is referred.<Reference Include="">

3. Delete the line

    <SpecificVersion>False</SpecificVersion> 
    or 
    <SpecificVersion>True</SpecificVersion>
   

After deleting dll files from Visual Studio first and adding them back manually from Solution Explorer --> Website --> Add --> Reference and enabling 32-bit Applications in IIS fixed it for me.

VS2017 VB.Net Windows 10 Pro - I use an assembly names "SharedCollection" which includes a VB Module named MyGlobals. One of the globals is a FileVersion. References showed metadata and the Windows Service that referenced it had an outdated setting. I had tried some of the SUO remedies above and none of them worked.

This Worked

I deleted and recreated the project reference for ShareCollection in References.

1. click on web site menu from VS.
2. Add reference...
3. Click on project tab from dialog box
4. Select ddl
5. Click on ok button

In my case, I had just recently changed

<mvcBuildViews>

to "true" in my site's .csproj file (to find compile errors in my Razor view files: http://forums.asp.net/t/1909113.aspx?How+to+have+Visual+Studio+2012+returned+compile+errors+on+razor+syntax+error+in+asp+net+web+page+2+ ), and when I then built I was getting errors from my within my site's /obj/Debug/ directory. From any of those files (which were out-of-date), right-clicking and selecting "Go To Definition" would give me the [metadata] version.

So for me, none of the solutions here worked, because I wasn't starting from a file that was actually in my project. Deleted that entire /obj/Debug/ directory, the errors went away, and from any normal file I can correctly use Go To Definition.

I just ran into this problem on VS 2013. Something I could (did?) not isolate was changing the GUID in the CSPROJ file. Since the CSPROJ files are checked into SVN, I could not simply change the GUID on my local dev. Instead, I was constantly SVN reverting the local change each time it happened.

First, I had to solve the changing GUID problem.

1. Revert the CSPROJ to the checked-in version.

2. Open the CSPROJ via a text editor, NOT VS.

3. Extract value from the pristine CSPROJ file.

   {B1234567-5123-4AAE-FE43-8465767788ED}

4. Open the SLN file via a text editor, NOT VS.

5. Locate the Project reference in the solution.

   Project("{FAE12345-3210-1357-B3EB-00CA4F396F7C}") = "Some.Project", "....\assemblies\Some.Project\Some.Project.csproj", "{B7654321-5321-4AAE-FE3D-ED20900088ED}" EndProject

6. The first GUID listed is the Solution GUID. For every project referenced in your SLN, you should see this value repeated at the first argument. The GUID following the .csproj is the one you want to replace with the pristine GUID.

This should solve the first problem, but the "Go to Definition" landing in meta data is not solved. In our SLN file, there is a master project (our web site), so its entry in the SLN file should contain a ProjectSection entry with multiple GUID values. Here is an example:

ProjectSection(ProjectDependencies) = postProject
{AC50D230-24C4-4DCA-BAAD-355E6AF5EFBD} = {AC50D230-24C4-4DCA-BAAD-355E6AF5EFBD}
EndProjectSection

Notice the missing GUID in this collection is the one from my pristine project.

1. Add the missing GUID as the last entry between ProjectSection and EndProjectSection. The format appears to be per-line, and it is {GUID} = {GUID}.
2. Save the file.
3. Open your solution.
4. Right-click a reference in the newly-added project and "Go to Definition."

I had a circular reference between the two projects involved (which is a no-no). Had to restructure my code a bit in order to solve it as both projects were truly dependant on each other. Removing one of the references solved the intellisense problem. It was logically flawed and I probably wouldn't have noticed without this error!

This one worked for me:

1. Right click the dll in the reference folder in your solution explorer
2. Remove dll file
3. Right click the Reference folder, then
4. Add reference to the dll file again

This can happen if you're trying to jump to the definition in a project that has been unloaded (Unavailable). Right-click the unloaded project and select "Reload Project".

I modified the .csproj file and in the Reference -> HinPath changed obj to bin and it solved the problem.

I had a variation of this issue, where when I loaded my solution my referencing project had errors until I compiled the project it was referencing. At that point the errors disappeared but F12 took me to metadata.

The issue was a dependency in the project being referenced that conflicted with a dependency in the referencing project. I manually removed dependencies from the project being referenced until one of them resolved the errors in the referencing project. After that I was able to F12 to the actual code, and the project would load without errors.

If anyone knows exactly why this happens I'm interested to know in the comments.

This little trick solved it for me - unload the referencing project from the solution and then just reload it

Best guess is that you don't have debug information. Maybe you have multiple copies of your assembly on disk and it doesn't have the .pdb file with it.

Do a search for your assembly names from your projects and delete them all and rebuild.