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I have a Visual Studio 2019 environment that has been running perfectly for a while. Until it gave weird errors today (I cannot now recall what they were).
After having tried misc. suggestions, including repairs of installation, dotnet core, checking updates of my Windows 10 installation etc., I uninstalled my recent Visual Studio installations, uninstalled all .net core installations except 2.2 and above. I also checked that folders were deleted as expected.
I then installed Visual Studio 2019 Professional from scratch using Visual Studio installer, but it will not start. This is the error I am getting in a popup window. I am getting the same error if I try and run devenv.exe /resetsettings
"Unrecognized configuration section startup ....appdata\local\microsoft\visualstudio\16.0_xxxxxxxx\devenv.exe.config line 13"
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Hi tobbenb3 ,
I have checked the file from the error message:
And you can also confirm it is similar with it.
In addition, maybe you can try to download Microsoft .NET Framework Repair Tool to repair your .net framework, then restart your machine to start visual studio.
Best Regards,
Dylan
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Thanks - I have the same line in that file - I also have dotnet Framework sdk 4.7.2 installed by the way. Running that repair toolkit did not help, unfortunately.
Hi @tobbenb3 , you can try to run the command line devenv.exe /clearcache and devenv /updateconfiguration in Developer Command Prompt for VS 2019.
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Firstly you should not have uninstalled .NET Core. That is a runtime, not part of VS proper. You will have likely broken any app that relies on .NET Core. Also, uninstalling is rarely the correct solution. It seems to be the go to solution when somebody cannot figure something out and is, in my opinion, almost always wrong. Reminds me of the other great "solutions" that I hear - reboot, reinstall Windows, switch to another browser...
At this point I suspect you have mangled your installation of VS badly and possibly removed stuff that VS needed. So you may have issues going forward. For the very specific error you're getting, go to your appdata\local\visualstudio folder and delete it. This will wipe out all your user stuff for VS but reinstalling effectively made it a mute point anyway. Then start VS so it'll rebuild your settings.
In the future when you run into an issue with VS then run it in safemode using the /safemode option. If that works then the issue is related to an extension in most cases and you can work backwards to figure out the problem. If safemode doesn't work then reporting the issue to MS will help them diagnose the problem. In my experience it is almost always tied to a corrupted setting or whatever. Generally deleting the appdata\local folder information for the VS instance resolves the issue.
I would think that even with MS' complex software, it should be able to start without complaining about something being wrong with a file the installer just installed from scratch. I did not remove all versions of .net core, not to mention .net framework. Besides - my problems started without me making any changes to Visual Studio, or SDKs. The error I mentioned was also the same before I tried the uninstall path.
It seems to me that we are all so used to buggy software from Microsoft, that we think this is to be expected.
But thank you for your suggestions.
So you removed the file that I recommended and you are now able to start VS?
I had already deleted the local forlder as part of me uninstalling everything - getting the same error.
Thanks to all for suggestions. I have tried so many things - running devenv /clearcache or /updateconfiguration also gave lots of errors and I ended up in a loop with VS asking for license and crashing again after adding the license account. (I somehow think my problems started because of an expired license)
I have tried this:
and even all suggestions from an MS support person without getting anywhere. The last suggestions involved deleting in the registry, and it is possible that it could have been solved that way (?) - what I tried was not enough.
Anyway - on Friday I decided I did not have the time or patience to clean this up in any other way than doing a Windows Reset. A reset (keeping my user data) worked like a charm. After installing Visual Studio 2019 again everything works fine.