Found out what happened
I installed first Visual Studio, and removed some components that I thought wouldn’t be necessary (c++, f#, etc). I also removed visual web developer tools (shouldn’t have done that… you’ll see why in a minute).
After that, I installed Service Pack 1. Then, when trying to install the Silverlight 4 tools, I got an strange error message and I couldn’t continue. After searching the web, I found out that the SP1 for VS2010 comes with the Silverlight 4 tools bundled, and it should be installed by it.
The problem comes here : since I didn’t have my VS installation with the web developer tools installed, the SP1 installer just disregarded the Silverlight tools installation. And since Microsoft’s Silverlight 4 toolkit installer is buggy (if you have SP1 for VS2010 you just get this weird error and can’t continue), I was stuck.
How did I solve it? Add web developer tools to VS2010, and reapply SP1. It’s a much faster solution than uninstalling SP1, installing Silverlight 4 tools and reinstalling SP1.
Let’s hope that Microsoft grows aware of this situation, and upgrades their Silverlight tools installer to be a little more clever in the future so we don’t have to be doing these workarounds
Opening an unsupported MVC project in Visual Studio 2012 or Visual Studio 2013 is actually pretty easy to accomplish with two steps. In fact, as bytebender’s comment indicates, these same steps should apply to and work for MVC 1 projects. However, I haven’t tested them and therefore cannot guarantee that they do in fact work.
Assuming that you have not already done so step one is to download and install MVC 1, MVC 2 or MVC 3 (close Visual Studio before starting the installation).
Once you have the appropriate flavor of MVC installed the project will still not load in VS 2012. This is because ASP.NET MVC projects are a project subtype of the Web Application project type. This means that the project has additional add ins and features available to it when used within Visual Studio.
Both Visual Studio 2012 and Visual Studio 2013 are limited in their backwards compatibility with ASP.NET MVC and other project types. Unfortunately, installing the old MVC bits did not change that. Visual Studio 2012 is compatible with the ASP.NET MVC 3 and 4 project flavors. Visual Studio 2013 is compatible with MVC 4 and MVC 5.
To get the project to load you will have to modify the project file. To do so right click on the unloaded project and select Edit. Which will open the project file as an XML text file. Find the ProjectTypeGuids
node which should look something like this:
<ProjectTypeGuids>
{F85E285D-A4E0-4152-9332-AB1D724D3325};{349c5851-65df-11da-9384-00065b846f21};{fae04ec0-301f-11d3-bf4b-00c04f79efbc}
</ProjectTypeGuids>
Remove the appropriate Project Guid from the list:
- ASP.NET MVC 1:
{603c0e0b-db56-11dc-be95-000d561079b0}
- ASP.NET MVC 2:
{F85E285D-A4E0-4152-9332-AB1D724D3325}
(shown in example above)
- ASP.NET MVC 3:
{E53F8FEA-EAE0-44A6-8774-FFD645390401}
- ASP.NET MVC 4:
{E3E379DF-F4C6-4180-9B81-6769533ABE47}
With the appropriate GUID removed the ProjectTypeGuids
should look similar to this:
<ProjectTypeGuids>
{349c5851-65df-11da-9384-00065b846f21};{fae04ec0-301f-11d3-bf4b-00c04f79efbc}
</ProjectTypeGuids>
Save the file and close the Visual Studio project file editor. Right click the project and select reload. If the project does not reload close and reopen Visual Studio. You should now be able to work with your old ASP.NET MVC project in your new version of Visual Studio.
One important thing to note is that after these modifications Visual Studio is not aware that this is an ASP.NET MVC project; therefore the project-specific features like "Add Controller, View etc." will not be present in menus.
Best Answer
Silverlight 4 is not supported. The list of supported frameworks and targeting packs for Visual Studio 2013 can be found here.
Silverlight
For Silverlight 4 and below you'll need to use the older version of Visual Studio or upgrade your project. Officially Silverlight 4 is also no longer supported on older versions of visual Studio though, the primary reason for this is that Silverlight 4 has reached the end of its support lifecycle.
Official overview can be found here.
Silverlight 4
Lifecycle Start Date: 4/15/2010
Mainstream Support End Date: 1/8/2013
Extended Support End Date: Review Note
Notes: Support for releases known as Tools ends no less than 12 months following the notification date. Customers are encouraged to promptly update to a later release to continue to receive support, including security updates.