Solved a problem with an Visual Studio 2008 “Source control provider could not be found” error…

.NET, ASP.NET, Web Development / By

I had run into this problem before.

Setup

  1. I have my Visual Studio 2008 options set to reload the previously loaded solution on startup.
  2. I use Subversion.
  3. I use AnkhSVN as my SVN provider in Visual Studio 2008.

Problem
If I launched Visual Studio 2008 with a particular solution loaded when I last closed VS, I would receive a “Source control provider could not be found” error.

However… if I just launched it via double-clicking on the .SLN file in my file system, no error!!!

Weird.

OK – so I did a quick diff on a solution that I knew worked fine. Both had the expected source control provider information embedded:

SccProjectName = "Svn"
SccAuxPath = "Svn"
SccLocalPath = "Svn"
SccProvider = "SubversionScc"

However there was a difference.

The solution that did not generate the error message also contained the following block in the “Global” section:

GlobalSection(SubversionScc) = preSolution
    Svn-Managed = True
    Manager = AnkhSVN - Subversion Support for Visual Studio
EndGlobalSection

Which somehow got generated in one solution, but not the one causing problems. Once I copied the block from one solution to the other, the error message ceased to be shown on launch of VS2008.