How to resolve error loading DB project in Visual Studio 2010

Question

I suddenly started getting the following error in the "General" ouput window of Visual Studio 2010 when loading the database project as part of a pretty large solution:

Cannot evaluate the item metadata "%(FullPath)". The item metadata "%(FullPath)" cannot be applied to the path "obj\Debug|Any CPU\Database.dbschema". Illegal characters in path. C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v4.0.30319\Microsoft.Common.targets

Nothing has changed in the .Net framework recently, and there is not mention of FullPath in the Database.dbproj file.

Googling around yielded this blog entry, but resetting the Visual Studio environment did not help: http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en/vstsdb/thread/14eecc38-87fe-4234-b5fa-c2fa7cab9ae9

Answer 1

After much banging my head against the wall, it occurred to me to try and load the DB project on its own, outside the solution. Lo and behold, that worked. This gave me the clue that something was wrong with the solution itself. I compared the .sln file that was generated when I opened the project on its own with the contents of the large solution, but nothing obvious jumped out. In the end, I deleted the .suo file and that solved it for about a day. The next day, the problem returned, and deleting the .suo file did not fix it.

The culprit? ReSharper 6 EAP. Disable ReSharper and the problem goes away.

http://youtrack.jetbrains.net/issue/RSRP-255109

Answer 2

As a side note for someone that may stumble on this post in the future. Whenever you get a error that says something like:

cannot evaluate the item metadata (fullpath) etc...

Most of the time this relates to the character limitations of paths that cannot exceed 260 characters all the way to the bin folder. It is a really cryptic error that has wasted too many people's time in the past.

Watch the length of those project names and the depth of your folder structure ;-)