Strange limitation with Visual Studio Solution file...

Question

Hopefully this is the right forum for general questions about Visual Studio....

I have a Visual Studio solution file here which contains about 40 x C/C++ projects. However I can't seem to add any more (at least, not successfully). The new ones seem okay at first - but if I close the Solution file and then re-open it later, I can't access the Properties for the newly added ones (right-clicking and selecting Properties produces a message box saying:- There are no property pages for the selection).

and yet I can load the exact same project files into a newly created Solution - so 2 x questions:-

1) Is there a limit now to the number of VC projects that a Solution can contain?
2) Is it likely the Solution itself could have become corrupted? I've noticed that each VS Solution has a couple of files called Browse.VC.db and Solution.VC.db. If I were to delete those files, will that screw up the VS Solution or would they get safely regenerated?

Answer 1

Literally just a few minutes ago I think I found the problem....

All of these project files share a common '.props' file which mostly contains a series of build paths to the other projects - but one of those paths had somehow acquired an @ character (and I think '@' is illegal in a filepath ??)

I haven't yet figured out how the @ character got there but I've corrected it manually and it seems to have fixed the problem. Total fluke that I found it !!