Go to definition (or implementation) not working as expected on Visual Studio 2026

[vsfeedback]

This issue has been moved from a ticket on Developer Community.

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[severity:It's more difficult to complete my work] [regression] [worked-in:18.0.1]
I work on C# applications, precisely ASP.NET Webforms with solutions including several projects (a main project and some library projects). In Visual Studio 2022, hitting F12 takes the editor to the definition inside the source file: now in 2026 it opens the decompiled version of the library itself, making impossible to perform code changes on-the-fly.

I tried disabling all the options under Text Editor -> c# -> Advanced -> Go to definition but it opens always the decompiled version of the code.

I'm forced to revert back to VS2022, it's almost impossible to work in this way, it's common for me and my team to jump on the source code inside the projects using F12.

I saw some suggestions to clear all the .vs, bin and obj folders but I think is not the correct solution, I have several libraries and some configurations I don't want to lose and rebuild from scratch.

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Original Comments

Feedback Bot on 11/24/2025, 03:11 AM:

We have directed your feedback to the appropriate engineering team for further evaluation. The team will review the feedback and notify you about the next steps.

Matt Jones on 11/25/2025, 02:08 PM:

I have the same issue, Ctrl + Click is now taking me to the [Decompiled] version of a class that is already inside my solution, no idea why.

It’s making navigation very tricky indeed.

Feedback Bot on 12/1/2025, 01:33 PM:

This issue is currently being investigated. Our team will get back to you if either more information is needed, a workaround is available, or the issue is resolved.

[CyrusNajmabadi]

@jasonmalinowski are you aware of any issues making it so that a P2P reference improperly ends up as a metadata-reference?

[jasonmalinowski]

@CyrusNajmabadi: We rely on matching the output file paths and the input file paths to link up projects. The some common cases you might see:

1. There's some customization in the project file which is causing things to not line up. For example, they have some custom build task that further takes the output in the bin directory and copies that to somewhere else, and then the ProjectReference in consuming that. We won't see those matching since there's an extra copy in the middle.
2. There is a circularity in the project graph (yes...this happens in broken solutions) or two projects producing the "same" output path. Since it's ambiguous which project to pick in that case, we leave it a project reference.

Since this is also a web project, maybe something got changed which is causing us to not get the correct output path.

It looks like the ticket internally has a dump file, so there is a map in the ProjectSystemProjectFactory where we map output paths to the projects they come from. Look at that and see if something looks amiss.

[richardtregaskis]

This happens to me every few hours. The solutions work perfectly fine in VS 2022 and will work fine in VS 2026 for after deleting the bin and obj folders, but like I said, it comes back again every few hours. Happens across multiple solutions. To be clear, when I do Go to Definition, it gives me a decompiled version of the class that is part of the solution instead of navigating to the project class (or method). VS 2026 did not do this originally, started after an update around October.