VS2013 - Operation Could Not Be Completed

Question

After installing Visual Studio 2013 and playing around with some of the new features, I noticed I'm unable to open a cshtml file in one of my MVC projects. If I try opening it in the default html editor, I'm receiving the following error

The operation could not be completed

Opening the file in another editor, IE: HTML (Webforms) Editor, opens the file without any issue. So it seems to be an issue with the default Html Editor.

I've followed various suggestions for how to combat this problem from previous versions of VS. If I delete all the solution's ".suo" files, and restart Visual Studio, the error changes to:

Object reference not set to an instance of an object

Once Visual Studio creates a new ".suo" file, the error message reverts back to the previous one.

I've tried doing a repair install on VS2013, however I'm still running into the same issues. Also, running VS in Safe-Mode did not work either. I tried creating a new MVC project, which failed during creation. With any of these errors, the windows event log does not contain any messages.

Has anyone else had this problem?

possible duplicate of [Visual Studio popup: "the operation could not be completed"](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9079466/visual-studio-popup-the-operation-could-not-be-completed) — Nic, Sep 28 '15 at 08:26
@Nicholas - While both of the questions have similar symptoms/error messages, the problems are in fact different. The answer to the suggested duplicate involved deleting the .suo file for the project, which did not resolve the issue that I was receiving. The error I was receiving ended up being related to Visual Studio 2013 not handling a web.config setting that previous versions of Visual Studio could handle. — Brosto, Sep 28 '15 at 14:53

score 35 · Answer 1 · answered Oct 24 '13 at 20:45

35

Just found your question here because it happened to me as well. Here's what I did and hopefully it will fix / help find the problem.

Deleted all .suo
Terminate IIS Express
Close VS2013 and re-open
Open your project and try to start it (F5)
You probably have an error on your web.config file. For me it was an <appSettings> being there twice.
Fixed the web.config file, save and boom, error is gone.

Hope it will also fix your situation.

answered Oct 24 '13 at 20:45

Dominic St-Pierre

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1

I followed your steps, but I don't get any error in my web.config, I also checked for duplicate , there were no dupes. Unfortunately, I'm still receiving the error. – Brosto Oct 29 '13 at 22:02
7

Thanks, I'm pretty sure you only have to check your web.config file. Mine had a merge conflict in it, resulting in this error. – Elger Mensonides Feb 27 '14 at 16:40
4

An error in the web.config will cause this. For example I had misplaced a element inside of the node instead of at the root which caused this error. Fixing the web.config will allow you to open cshtml files again. – Rush Frisby Mar 13 '14 at 14:01
From doing a previous search in the web.config (control + f) I hit shift instead and it printed F at the end of one of the tags. I didn't realize it.. – The Muffin Man Jul 15 '14 at 17:11
For me, it was a capitalized "K" in "key" in my section in web.config. Thank you! – Dave Markle Feb 04 '15 at 14:19

score 25 · Answer 2 · answered Mar 17 '16 at 09:14

25

Found a working solution here (tested with VS2015 Update 1):

https://github.com/aspnet/Tooling/issues/276#issuecomment-166650817

Close VS

Delete the content of %LocalAppData%\Microsoft\VisualStudio\14.0\ComponentModelCache

Open VS

answered Mar 17 '16 at 09:14

kabeleced

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That was helpful for me – NikitaKo Aug 24 '16 at 08:19
Worked for me. Thanks – Fab60 Jan 30 '17 at 15:06
@kabeleced thank you so much. I was going mad about this error. I wish windows was not so unpredictable while setting something on it. – Burak Karasoy Jun 17 '17 at 17:45
1

I had to do something after that to make it work in my case (VS 2017): Changed the target browser from Chrome to IE. Then F5 and wait until it is finish. Stop it and change the browser back to Chrome. After that the error disappeared. – user3772108 Jun 04 '18 at 14:03

score 9 · Accepted Answer · answered Oct 30 '13 at 13:36

I just figured it out. In my web.config, I had the following in my

  <appSettings>
    <add key="webpages:Version" value="2.0.?.?" />
  </appSettings>

Changing this the value to "3.0.0.0" resolved the issue. I never had a problem with this on VS2010 or VS2012. It seems there is something in the IDE that is not handling this gracefully.

score 6 · Answer 4 · answered Jan 14 '16 at 18:27

6

That worked for me for VS 2015 (command prompt as Admin):

cd C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 14.0\Common7\IDE
devenv.exe /resetuserdata

answered Jan 14 '16 at 18:27

Vlad

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This is so annoying.. Happens to me once a week now. and, when I reset user data, of course I have to install all extensions again... – Erik A. Brandstadmoen Jan 29 '16 at 12:05
I got this same error but only after I installed ASP.NET 5 RC1, I ran Visual Studio 2015 Update 1 which fixed the issue for me – Andre Lombaard Feb 03 '16 at 06:20

score 5 · Answer 5 · answered Apr 11 '15 at 13:42

Like most people here have mentioned, review your web.config file for duplicates. I was in a rush, just copied and pasted appSettings from another solutions without noticing the section existed already in the existing document. Then issue this thread relates to started to surface. I went back and consolidated the appSettings, saved, and the issue ceased to exist.

double <appSettings> conflict

score 3 · Answer 6 · answered Jan 03 '14 at 23:55

3

For me this error was resolved by setting the VS 2013 shortcut to "run as administrator".

answered Jan 03 '14 at 23:55

ErikE

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I have this problem on my laptop, but not my desktop. Both machines have pretty much identical Visual Studio configurations. The web.config answer didn't work. I have ReSharper installed, but disabling it didn't solve the problem, so it's probably not related. Running as admin worked for me, but I'd like to have a better fix. Any idea what specifically needs elevated privileges? – Jared Jun 30 '14 at 15:35
My only guess: In Windows 7 and up, reading and writing to directories that are outside of the My Documents folder. – ErikE Jun 30 '14 at 23:48

score 3 · Answer 7 · answered Feb 10 '15 at 11:38

3

Check for errors in your web.config file:

duplicate keys (app settings)
tags not closed or used multiple times
...

answered Feb 10 '15 at 11:38

Bjorn Vdkerckhove

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score 1 · Answer 8 · answered Jan 21 '14 at 05:25

1

It is due to IIS Express not running from Visual Studio when you try to debug the aspx page.

Quick and dirty fix is to right click the your project and choose "Use Visual Studio Development Server" and then again right click and choose back to "Use IIS Express" will fix this problem. This way I will care about all the changes required in configuration file.

answered Jan 21 '14 at 05:25

Ahmad

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This was my problem, except it was related to having no host environment set, I am using LocalIIS, but the Properties->Web->Servers setting was set to ExternalHost, I changed it to the proper one for me and it worked, the "Object reference not set to an instance of an object" error went away. – John Maloney Oct 03 '15 at 23:02

score 0 · Answer 9 · answered Oct 01 '14 at 15:25

0

I also got this problem after using some Nuget package. The problem was a duplicate of appSettings. I merged them all and it worked.

answered Oct 01 '14 at 15:25

Patrick Desjardins

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score 0 · Answer 10 · edited Jun 20 '20 at 09:12

There is also this thread that an MS employee has answered with possible cause:

This is a bug in the debugger. There is a race condition that happens when all of the following are true:

Script debugging is enabled in IE User is debugging IE and another process

The other process stops (hits breakpoint, step operation completes, stops at an exception, etc) at a moment when IE is not running script code

IE starts running script code at roughly the same moment that the user hits F10/F5 in Visual Studio.

The most likely reason for this to happen is that the code from 'setTimeout' is run, but I am not a JScript expert, so I am sure there are other possible reasons as well.

and these workarounds:

If you hit this problem, I believe you could detach the debugger and then re-attach.

-or-

This problem happens when debugging ASP.NET and when script debugging is enabled in IE. If you disable script debugging in IE, or toggle it on and off when switching between debugger server-side and client-side problems, you would be able to work around the issue.

-or-

If your web application is using setTimeout, you may be able to avoid or at least reduce the problem by doing something to ensure that script runs less often. This could mean increasing the timeout value, or this could mean adding conditions around when setTimeout is used.

score 0 · Answer 11 · answered Oct 24 '15 at 10:21

0

I had error in my web.config file, there was two spaces before <xml> tag. after removing it stopped showing this error.

answered Oct 24 '15 at 10:21

Techmaster

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score 0 · Answer 12 · answered Jan 11 '16 at 10:21

0

I had the same error in VS 2015 running on Win 10. Fortunately fixed simply with a reboot. On restart it appears windows applied some updates in the previous session which broke VS somehow.

answered Jan 11 '16 at 10:21

Dan

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score 0 · Answer 13 · answered Feb 03 '16 at 06:22

0

I got this error in Visual Studio 2015 but only after I installed ASP.NET 5 RC 1. Installing Visual Studio 2015 Update 1 fixed the problem for me.

answered Feb 03 '16 at 06:22

Andre Lombaard

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score 0 · Answer 14 · answered Mar 24 '16 at 19:44

What solved my issue is this :

Type %LOCALAPPDATA% in Windows Explorer and go to Microsoft\XX.0 your version of Visual Studio then delete the folder ComponentModelCache

Restart VS and it worked like a charm!

This is due to an update made to GitHub which is reported in their forum

score 0 · Answer 15 · answered Jun 15 '17 at 08:56

I was asked by a colleague to look at this problem. I tried all the proposed solutions and nothing worked. Eventually I found that they had done a project Update from svn and they had a conflict and ignored it. In one of the config files I found the conflict marked ".yours". I corrected this and all now loads without error.

score 0 · Answer 16 · answered Jun 16 '17 at 09:58

0

In my case, the problem was due to my web.config's app settings include pointing to a file that doesn't exist:

<appSettings configSource="App_Config\MISSPELT-FILENAME.config" />

answered Jun 16 '17 at 09:58

Andy Holt

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VS2013 - Operation Could Not Be Completed

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