Visual Studio. “The operation could not be completed” Error.
The weird popup error window “The operation could not be completed” while trying to deploy the project to a Windows Mobile 5 device was an unpleasant surprise for a Friday morning. No further tips from Visual Studio (2005). The first thought was, there was something wrong with connection to a mobile device. ActiveSync icon was actually green, but for any case I decided explicitly to press the button in IDE to establish manually the connection. The popup windows didn’t appear anymore, yes! … but the things became more strange. Something like “No execution file was found” message appeared now on my PDA display. The project seemed not to be compiled, but Visual Studio tried already to start it on PDA. The most interesting thing was the fact, that I checked out the fresh version of the project from our SVN server. My colleague didn’t experienced this problem.
Solution. Check once again, wether all the static content like images, video, files etc. are still in you project directory!!! Usually if a class is missing Visual Studio immediately inform you. But with static content it turned out to be not so obvious. The project we work on now is very large and contains a large directory tree with numerous html pages and images. My colleague deleted an image from SVN by mistake, but it was still registered in the solution. It took a while till I found the picture that was the cause for an unpleasant Friday morning 