In the office recently, some of our Visual Studio machines have been having trouble opening up some web applications created by other staff.  They get greeted with the rather unpleasant (and not very useful) “Project type is not supported by this installation” message.

After som googling on the issue, I stumbled across a blog on Ira Miller‘s blog, talking about the new version of the web applications add on for visual studio 2005, which, apparently is not backwards compatible with the old.

Leaving the arguments about legacy support and upgrade paths aside, I found that an easy solution to the problem is to simply download the Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 – Update to Support Web Application Projects and install it on the machine in question.  We’ve found that in 2 instances, this solved our troubles.

More information about the Visual Studio 2005 Web Application Projects, can be found here.