Wednesday, October 01, 2008

Navigation to the web page was cancelled

Have you been facing this error in Visual Studio 2005?
Other symptoms:
XML files will not open with Internet Explorer (tried with both IE6 and IE7). Schema files (*.xsd) will open fine though.
Visual Studio (2005) will not display any schema files in the source view. Instead a message saying "Navigation to the web page was cancelled" appears.

I was stuck with this problem for over 2 months and it took me a very long while to even identify the symptoms in any clarity. The internet, Microsoft and Google provided little help. Until finally an obscure post in a stylus studio forum had a similar thread.

Anyway, the cause is that the msxml3.dll was not registered. This is the dll that enables viewing of xml in IE.
The fix is to re-register the dll. Hit start, Run and type in the following:
regsvr32 msxml3.dll

This re-registers the dll. Problem solved.
Apparently, one of the reasons this error can occur is because a shareware tool called Oxigen (an XML editor) was uninstalled.