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

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.NET\Framework64\v3.5 to %windir%\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v3.5:
  • 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)

Published 26 January 2008 04:09 PM by James Crowley
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Comments

# Frode said on 17 March, 2008 02:44 PM

You saved my day!

Thanx.

Frode

# Rosi Reddy said on 26 March, 2008 12:49 AM

That's awesome. it works.

# Anton Staykov said on 26 April, 2008 04:14 PM

You ROCK !!

This drove me crazy until I found your post!

# Stephan van Stekelenburg said on 11 May, 2008 11:22 AM

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!

# Blog de Alberto said on 02 June, 2008 02:00 PM

Empiezas tu aplicación, haces la base de datos y luego añades el modelo a tu aplicación, ya sea winforms,

# Sumeet said on 09 June, 2008 12:04 AM

Ping: sumeetrattan.blogspot.com/.../entity-framework-and-openfiledialog.html

# microsoft data entity build tasks dll said on 11 July, 2008 11:28 AM

Pingback from  microsoft data entity build tasks dll

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