I get the following error when attempting to deploy a solution using visual studio 2010:
Error occurred in deployment step 'Activate Features': The parent content type specified by content type identifier 0x... does not exist.
There are 2 sets of content types, each installed by a separate feature. The first inherits fromDocument and works well enough. It's activated (and is set to activate on default) and I can see the content types are created
The second inherits from the first, has the first set as a feature dependency, and is NOT "Activated On Default" (which I'm beginning to think doesn't mean what it says it means)
Deploying the solution from vs 2010 worked until I added the second set of content types. Now I get the error above
I can see the second content types feature is installed but when I try to activate it manually I get a different error:
The content type with Id 0x...9901 defined in feature {...} was found in the current site collection or in a subsite.
In this case it's telling me the 2nd content type that the feature is meant to create already exists. Looking at the site content types I can see that no, it does not. None of the feature's content types are there
So VS tells me there's an error in deployment and it can't activate the feature that it's not supposed to activate because there's a missing content type, but the content type is there. Site settings tells me it cant activate the feature because the content types are already there, but they're not
Obviously none of this makes any sense, so at least I know I'm definitely still in SharePoint... Somewhere there's a little girl chasing a white rabbit down a hole with a ghost cat who'd see SharePoint and say "wtf?"... Anyway, anyone know what might cause a content types feature to not work, but work, but not work?