Can't Grok, Won't Grok

If you are receiving this really informative error message in Visual Studio and looking for a solution, I hope the following can help you. I spent wasted a fair bit of time trying to figure this out. Funny thing is, it’s actually quite common in the post-XP(i.e. Vista and Windows 7) era (I’ve had it myself several times now).. The Cause After much digging, it turns out the issue is caused by the file blocking placed on downloaded assemblies. For example, I had the following after downloading the binaries for Autofac and adding it to my project: Error    1    Unknown build error, 'Could not load file or assembly 'file:///c:\{Project}\lib\Autofac.dll' or one of its dependencies. Operation is not supported. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80131515)'     {Project} To Fix The good news, is this is pretty easy to fix (as are most problems when you know the cause!). Open up the file properties dialog (right click in Explorer ...

Wanting to play with the different technologies on my “ Tech ToDo ” and following on from my first Tech Day with NHibernate , I wanted to play with Microsoft’s Entity Framework (EF). EF is (to my understanding) a beefed up version of LINQ to SQL . So, I happily go ahead and download the .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 , install and eagerly run off to add my EF data model to my project.. But I can’t, there is no item for it in the templates. The tutorial (actually an MVC one) said there should be, the readme said there should be, but there wasn’t. Steps Attempted (to no avail) Following a tweet from @JeremySkinner , I checked that the assemblies ( System.Data.Entity* ) had installed OK to the reference assemblies folder ( C:\Program Files\Reference Assemblies\Microsoft\Framework\v3.5 ) – they had. Next please! Following on from that, I then thought about the version of Visual Studio I am running.. Mine is actually under the DreamSpark license as I am currently studying with a MS part...