The feature name XXX already exists in SharePoint. You need to rename the feature before solution deployment can succeed.

Published

on September 26, 2008

in .net, asp.net, sharepoint and visual studio

. 9 Comments Tags: asp.net, sharepoint, visual studio.

From time to time when I try to deploy a SharePoint project from Visual Studio 2005 I’m getting this error:

The feature name XXX* already exists in SharePoint. You need to rename the feature before solution deployment can succeed.

Solution
Whenever I get this (annoying) error I go to C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\TEMPLATE\FEATURES\ and remove the directory named XXX*. Sometimes then I need to restart Visual Studio or even log off and on again (on my Windows account).

17/102008
Sometimes restarting Visual Studio does the job.

* is the name of the module that should be deployed

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9 Responses to “The feature name XXX already exists in SharePoint. You need to rename the feature before solution deployment can succeed.”

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1 Jeremy
February 16, 2009 at 18:57

Bookmarked for future reference. TY
2 Jessica
April 7, 2009 at 0:31

I wanted to comment and thank the author, good stuff
3 NMT
June 23, 2009 at 16:59

Why does Microsoft hate us so much?
4 Madhu
July 3, 2009 at 19:52

Great Jarosław Dobrzański, You same my precious time by giving this answer.

thank you
5 designer clothes
July 6, 2009 at 12:29

my God, i thought you were going to chip in with some decisive insght at the end there, not leave it with ?we leave it to you to decide?.
6 donna
November 19, 2009 at 4:20

Hi. I followed ur steps above, however, i encountered another error.

The solution cannot be deployed. Directory “WebParts” associated with feature ‘d8c7e2e1-0027-424f-bda3-f47d363d97cc’ in the solution is used by feature ‘bb678af2-5e33-4dd1-a555-53f5f146c274′ installed in the farm. All features must have unique directories to avoid overwriting files.

How do i solve this error?

Thanks if you could help me.
7 Jarosław Dobrzański
November 19, 2009 at 9:13

Donna,

I can’t help you with that. This seems to be a different problem, which I haven’t experienced.

Jarek
8 Triston
January 13, 2010 at 22:45

Did you solve that issue Donna? I have the same type of problem.