visual studio - The project type is not supported by this installation

Question

Whenever I try to open a project (csproj) that's downloaded from the internet, most of the times, I get the

"The project type is not supported by this installation"

It appears that my Visual Studio installation is not corrupted (I can pretty much do everything with it other than open these csproj files)

What may be causing this?

Answer 1

Open up the .csproj file for your solution in wordpad or some text editor. Look for the ProjectTypeGuids. They indicate the required supported types for your solutions. Search the internet these GUIDs to find out what they require. For example E53F8FEA-EAE0-44A6-8774-FFD645390401 means it requires "MVC 3.0"