Solution to Visual Studio 2022 messing up Visual Studio 2019

As all .NET developers I am quite excited by Visual Studio 2022 and .NET 6 going RTM. However I noticed that Visual Studio 2022 RTM install messed up Visual Studio 2019. Our .NET 5 and .NET Standard 2 projects couldn’t be loaded anymore in Visual Studio 2019. The error shown when attempting to load the projects was:

The project file cannot be opened. Unable to locate the .NET SDK. Check that it is installed and that the version specified in global.json (if any) matches the installed version.

Hamid Mosalla compiled solutions to this problem in a great post. However none of those solutions worked. After an hour googling and tweaking I found the solution here VS2022 RC Install messed up my Android Xamarin projects in VS2019. In your system environment variable path, Visual Studio 2022 put C:\Program Files (x86)\dotnet\ before C:\Program Files\dotnet\. Just restore the right order et voilà 🙂

Btw to access this dialog go to : Window > Control Panel > Edit the system environment variables, then locate the variable Path in the list, select it and click the Edit button.

The solution is not intuitive at all and I hope this post will save you some time!

Edit:

• This solution seems to fix also this issue: Upgrade of Visual Studio or .NET SDK from earlier builds can result in a bad PATH configuration on Windows
• Alternatively you can delete the x86 version of the SDKs.
• Also a user reported: I had completely different behavior when I switched the 2022 Preview to Current. It removed All the x86 dotnet Sdks! I had to reinstall 3.1 x86 to get vs2019 to be able to load sdk style projects.