How can I work with XNA projects in Visual Studio 11 Beta?

Question

Visual Studio 11 was released a few weeks back and now that ReSharper is available for it, I'm ready to start using it!

Some of the projects I'm working on are XNA projects. These don't appear to load in VS11 Beta, even after reinstalling XNA Game Studio 4 Refresh after installing VS11 Beta.

Has anyone got VS11 Beta working with XNA projects?

Answer 1

I have just gotten it to work, it required some hackery.

This will work after installing XNA Game Studio 4.0.

Find the Game Studio 4.0 directory in:

C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\Common7\IDE\Extensions\Microsoft

Copy the directory to:

%AppData%\Local\Microsoft\VisualStudio\11.0\Extensions

You can go there in Explorer by entering %AppDatain the address bar, hitting enter, and then navigating or filling out the rest of the address bar (for some reason just pasting the full relative url doesn't work)

Where %AppData% stands for your personal AppData directory. It is a hidden directory in your personal directory which is usually situated in C:\Users\YourUserName.

You are not done, open the directory you just created and open the extension.vsixmanifest file with a texteditor and change this block:

<SupportedProducts>
  <VisualStudio Version="10.0">
    <Edition>VSTS</Edition>
    <Edition>VSTD</Edition>
    <Edition>Pro</Edition>
    <Edition>VCSExpress</Edition>
    <Edition>VPDExpress</Edition>
  </VisualStudio>
</SupportedProducts>

To this:

<SupportedProducts>
  <VisualStudio Version="11.0">
    <Edition>Ultimate</Edition>
    <Edition>Premium</Edition>
    <Edition>Pro</Edition>
  </VisualStudio>
</SupportedProducts>

And save it. Now go up one directory level to the Extensions directory and remove any cache files that are present (don't worry they are automatically regenerated) and restart Visual Studio. You should now be able to open your XNA projects!

edit:

There is now a more popular up to date question here: How to install XNA game studio on Visual Studio 2012?

For me it did not work, the extension only showed up when I installed another extension (I updated nuget), removing caches did not seem to help at all.