How to fix “Root element is missing.” when doing a Visual Studio (VS) Build?

Question

How to fix \"Root element is missing.\" when doing a Visual Studio (VS) Build?

Any idea what file I should look at in my solution?

Actually, I am getting thi

Answer 1

In my case, .csproj was changed to encoded format. I did undo changes to csproj in Git(Team explorer) and reloaded the project file. This solved the problem.

Answer 2

In my case the RDLC files work with resource files (.resx), I had this error because I hadn't created the correspondent resx file for my rdlc report.

My solution was add the file .resx inside the App_LocalResources in this way:

\rep
\rep\myreport.rdlc
\rep\App_LocalResources\myreport.rdlc.resx

Answer 3

In my case, the file C:\Users\xxx\AppData\Local\PreEmptive Solutions\Dotfuscator Professional Edition\4.0\dfusrprf.xml was full of NULL.

I deleted it; it was recreated on the first launch of Dotfuscator, and after that, normality was restored.

Answer 4

My project did not load and gave me a Root Element Missingerror. I just deleted ****.csproj.user file and reloaded it again. The problem was solved this way

Answer 5

Hey, I have the same issue on Mac working on a Cocoa C# solution. (But I solved it !)

It always say that the root element is missing so it cannot load my C# project file.

I have the 2017 Visual Studio Mac Community Edition. I finally managed to find a solution after several hours (painful!).

My solution is because the frameworks related to the Visual Studio are old or broken. I found this because I tried to create a new Mac solution by Cocoa and it said "failed to save the solution". Then, I tried to create an Android Solution and it is working fine. Go to your "Finder" and "Go" -> "Go to a Folder" then go to the "Library/Frameworks". I have deleted mono.framework and frameworks related to Xamarin because I believe these Xamarin frameworks are broken.

Then, uninstalled the Visual Studio and reinstalled it. Now everything works fine!

Answer 6

In my case the problem occurred due to closing my PC while visual studio were remain open, so in result csproj.user file saved empty. Thankfully i have already backup, so i just copied all xml from csproj.user and paste in my affected project csproj.user file ,so it worked perfectly.

This file just contain building device info and some more.