James Crowley

Fractional CTO | Sustainability, Climate & Impact

Gotcha: “The specified metadata path is not valid.” with ADO.NET Entities on Vista x64

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For those of you foolhardy enough to be running Vista x64 (myself included!), VS 2008, and the latest build of the ADO.NET Entities framework… you may well hit the following error message:


The specified metadata path is not valid. A valid path must be either an existing directory, an existing file with extension ‘.csdl’, ‘.ssdl’, or ‘.msl’, or a URI that identifies an embedded resource.

The catch is that apparently the designers are not supported on 64-bit machines. The workaround is to copy two files from %windir%Microsoft.NETFramework64v3.5 to %windir%Microsoft.NETFrameworkv3.5:


  • Microsoft.Data.Entity.Build.Tasks.dll


  • Microsoft.Data.Entity.targets

then restart Visual Studio and rebuild your solution.


Thanks to Tommy Williams @ MSFT (found on the forums)

Comments

4 responses to “Gotcha: “The specified metadata path is not valid.” with ADO.NET Entities on Vista x64”

  1. Frode avatar
    Frode

    You saved my day!

    Thanx.

    Frode

    Reply
  2. http:// avatar
    http://

    That”s awesome. it works.

    Reply
  3. Anton Staykov avatar
    Anton Staykov

    You ROCK !!
    This drove me crazy until I found your post!

    Reply
  4. Stephan van Stekelenburg avatar
    Stephan van Stekelenburg

    oh my god, finally after like 2 hours of trial and error, browsing msdn forums and searching the internet, it finally works…

    Thank you for this post, it finally saved my sanity!

    Reply

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