“The following Web projects must be converted to the new Web Site format” (Solved)

Converting your web project to a newer version of Visual Studio may result in this error when you try to open it after the migration: “The following Web projects must be converted to the new Web Site format”.

Here is the full error message:

The following Web projects must be converted to the new Web Site format. The conversion process will remove all source control bindings and the project will not be under source control after migration.

It may be followed by the message below.

Some of the properties associated with the solution could not be read.

The root cause of the problem is that the old Visual Studio project was migrated to “Web Application Project (WAP)” format while it was still bound to TFS. Presumably (not tested), this error shouldn’t have occurred if it was migrated to “Website Project” after unbinding from TFS.

Looking for a solution to fix “Declaration expected”, “Syntax error”, and “Statement cannot appear outside of a method” errors in Visual Studio? Check this post out.

Solution for “”The following Web projects must be converted to the new Web Site format” error

There a few approaches to take to solve this issue.

Approach 1:

• Open vspscc file (Project_Name.csproj.vspscc)  
• Change ENLISTMENT_CHOICE to NEVER
• Remove the value of ORIGINAL_PROJECT_FILE_PATH parameter

After the changes, it should look like this:

{
  "ENLISTMENT_CHOICE" = "NEVER"
  "ORIGINAL_PROJECT_FILE_PATH" = ""
}

After changing vspscc file, open your solution file (name.sln). Remove the line that has this parameter: SccProjectEnlistmentChoice.

Credits

Approach 2

• Remove all vspscc files. TFS is supposed to re-generate these files with correct settings
• Open your solution file (name.sln). Remove the lines that has this parameter: SccProjectEnlistmentChoice 

Credits

Approach 3

This approach may take more time but it’s a good opportunity for a clean start. It may actually save time if the first 2 approaches don’t solve the problem for some reason.

• Create a brand-new solution file with the new version of Visual Studio
• Copy your code manually to this solution
• Bind it to TFS

Additional Approaches

In this post, author suggests removing all GlobalSection blocks in the solution file except the one your project (the project that causes the error) uses. Then it recommends performing the steps I explained in the Approach 1 above.

In this Microsoft article, author suggests changing SCCServerPath value from relative path to absolute path in registry. This solution is specifically for the second error message in the beginning of this post (“Some of the properties associated with the solution could not be read”).