Visual Studio Hosting Process and "The operation could not be completed"

Question

When trying to execute from within Visual Studio 2008 your application and you get the (uninformative) message "The operation could not be completed".

The solution to this is to turn off the "Visual Studio Hosting Process".

The problem with turning off this "hosting process" is that all the "run and rewrite" functionality is no longer available. OK, so this isn't a big deal, but I'm always getting this message no matter what machine I use (and it might be nice once in a while to use the rewrite and execute functionality).

Am I doing something wrong? How come this "feature" within VS seems to complain so readily? Do other people have success with enabling the hosting process and making use of it?

Answer 1

The problem with turning off this "hosting process" is that all the "run and rewrite" functionality is no longer available.

The Visual Studio Hosting Process is not needed to allow Edit and Continue. It is used for "Design time expression Evalutation" in the case where the project is a dll rather than an EXE. It is also used to provide debugging for partial trust scenarios. See the documentation for everything it does.

It is highly unlikely it does anything you need, so don't feel bad turning it off.