Blue question mark on files in solution explorer

Question

I often get blue question marks on files in my VS2012 Solution Explorer when opening a solution bound to Perforce through P4VS.

Looks like something is having trouble to "synchronize" with the depot/workspace/whatnot. Hitting "Refresh View" always solves the issue but I'm growing tired on doing this everyday:

This is my VS version:

Microsoft Visual Studio Professional 2012
Version 11.0.61030.00 Update 4

And P4VS:

2014.1.85.4506

This is persistent across P4VS versions for a few months now, and seems to be affecting sometimes individual files, sometimes entire projects, with no apparent pattern.

How can I diagnose what's going wrong, be it a server issue, a VS issue, a workspace issue?... The Perforce Source Control output shows nothing special.

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Actually it's not entire folders, it's entire projects. It appears that even if refreshing a project "fixes" the issue for one run, re-opening the solution brings it back. Whereas I think that for individual files, refreshing them solves the issue once and for all. I'll play with it a bit more to confirm that.

Answer 1

This "solved" the issue for me, at least for the entire projects that went blue-question-marked:

1) Tools > Options

2) Source Control

3) Perforce - General

4) Tick the option "Treat Solution/Project as directory when selected"

Not sure why but that's one less annoyance for me every day. Thanks to Perforce support for suggesting that.

Answer 2

The file is probably not marked for version control. I noticed this icon in one file and opened Perforce to check. For whatever reason, this file was not marked for add in Perforce. After marking the file for add and submitting, the blue question mark went away.

Answer 3

To help diagnose what is going wrong you should probably turn on logging, and check the preferences that will show everything in the output window. For the P4VS log, go to:

     Tools- > Options -> Source Control -> Perforce - Logging

(This is not the same thing as the Visual Studio Activity log.)

There could be a possibility that you are getting disconnected and refresh reconnects you. I am not sure if you have your connection set to use solution-specific settings, since you did not mention the connection dialog coming up.