Visual Studio popup: “the operation could not be c

Question

When I try to open a project, local or on a Team Foundation Server (TFS), I get a modal window telling me that:

The operation could not be completed: Unspecified error

Or the same message, but with "Class not defined.." instead of "Unspecified error".

These errors started happening earlier today when I tried to check in some of my work to the team foundation server. I have tried using Visual Studio 2008 on the same computer, but I still get the same error. I've also googled for it but none of the solutions seems to help me.

I have installed the latest updates from Windows Update as well.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

Restarting Visual Studio solved my problem :)

Answer 2

For me it was because I'd added an entry to bind the site in IISExpress to a specific IP address, and my IP address had changed. I got a clue from the event log.

Hope this helps someone!

Answer 3

Solution: I was getting this dialogue when trying to build/rebuild/clean my .sln. To fix it I needed to stop the IIS site bound to the application and restart visual studio. (Then start your site again).

How I discovered the cause: Seems this is a pretty generic message for a wide range of issues, I ended up tracking down my particular issue to a few locked files by IIS with the event logs.

The solutions for deleting all sites are kind of a "Nuke it from orbit" approach which should be used as a last resort.

Answer 4

I was upgrading to .NET4.6 from a 3rd party app (unity3d). I would get this message when I tried to reload the solution when it wouldn't load on startup. My solution was right clicking the solution and selecting "install missing features" which prompted me to download what I needed. The download on the popup didn't work so I just installed the .NET targeting pack for what I was on (4.6) and this fixed it.

Answer 5

I deleted all .suo and .user files and restarted VS 2008. But it didn't worked for me. The following steps worked for me.

Open project file (.csproj) in notepad.
Removed all configurations from <Configurations></COnfigurations> tag.
Then add one by one configuration and reload project in VS.
Build the project or view project properties.

Answer 6

In our, the problem appeared after making changes in Debug -> myProject Properties -> Web, specifically changing the project URL and then closing VS. Upon reopening, VS had trouble parsing the new URL and so threw the error. Unfortunately, further configuration through the VS UI was not possible since the project won't load.

Since the file configuration changes are persisted in the myProject.csproj.user file, which lives in the project's root folder, the problem was easy to correct by simply removing the myProject.csproj.user file. At that point the project would load and the user file was then regenerated when the project was next run in debug mode.

Note, the project URL in the regenerated file had to be changed from the default http://localhost:58995 to the original https://localhost:44302 before the entire application could be accessed since we have the app locked down under SSL. Your ports may be different. This was done through VS under Debug -> myProject Properties -> Web after running the project.