Tuesday, October 22, 2013

Unblocking Downloaded Visual Studio Projects

As a developer, I download sample projects quite frequently. Usually, when opening these projects, Visual Studio will give the following warning:


Now, we can simply click the "OK" button here. But there may be other problems. This is especially true if the solution includes compiled DLLs. These files may be blocked by Windows since they were downloaded from the internet.

Unblocking Files
The easiest solution is to unblock the files before opening the solution in Visual Studio. Here are the steps:
  1. Locate the original ZIP file that you downloaded from the internet.
  2. Right-click on the ZIP file and choose "Properties".
  3. At the bottom, you may see a "Security" section that says "This file came from another computer and might be blocked to help protect this computer."

  4. Click the "Unblock" button.
  5. Unzip the files and open the solution in Visual Studio.
  6. Before opening any specific project, go to the "Build" menu item and select "Rebuild Solution".
This usually takes care of the problems. (And, of course, only do this with files that come from a trustworthy source.)

Happy Coding!

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