I’m having all kinds of problems getting Visual Studio 2010 to work with the Windows Phone 7 templates. All I have is a default portrait view added to the project, and the designer gives me the following error:
System.IO.FileNotFoundException
Could not load file or assembly ‘Microsoft.Phone, Version=7.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=24eec0d8c86cda1e’ or one of its dependencies. The system cannot find the file specified.
followed by a bunch of crap that doesn’t seem too helpful. If I rebuild the project and refresh the designer, it momentarily appears correctly (less than a second), and then Visual Studio crashes and tries to restart.
Anyone have any idea why this might be happening?
Well, sounds like the install didn’t go well. Verify that this reference assembly is located where it is supposed to be, the default install location is c:\program files\reference assemblies\microsoft\framework\silverlight\v4.0\profile\windowsphone. Randomly retrying to reinstall might pay off but do check your machine health first, this doesn’t go wrong very often. Ask questions about that at superuser.com