Can't Add View from Controller in VS 2015 : “There was an error running the selected code generator”

Question

I\'m following a video tutorial where I\'m required to create an empty ASP.NET Web Application with MVC, using Visual Studio 2015, bei

Answer 1

I'm currently trying to familiarise myself with MVC 4. I've been developing with MVC 5 for a while, but I need to know MVC 4 to study for my MCSD certification. I'm following a tutorial via Pluralsight, targeting much older versions of Entity Framework, and MVC, (the video was released in 2013!)

I hit this exact same error 2 hours ago and have been tearing my hair out trying to figure out what is wrong. Thankfully, because the project in this tutorial is meaningless, I was able to step backward throughout the process to figure out what it was that was causing the object ref not set error, and fix it.

What I found was an error within the structure of my actual solution.

I had a MVC web project set up ('ASP.NET Web Application (.NET Framework)'), but I also had 2 class libraries, one holding my Data Access Layer, and one holding the domain setup for models connecting to my database.

These were both of type 'Class Library (.NET Standard)'.

The MVC project did not like this.

Once I created new projects of type 'Class Library (.NET Framework)', and copied all the files from the old libraries to the new ones and fixed the reference for the MVC web project, a rebuild and retry allowed me to scaffold the View correctly.

This may seem like an obvious fix, don't put a .NET Standard project alongside a .NET Framework one and expect it to work normally, but it may help others fix this issue!