I am doing some work on VS2008 at present and I when I started my VS2008, which I had not used for a while, I was plagued by errors along the lines of “The operation could not be completed”. These occurred when running major features such as:
- Loading LINQ to SQL Designer
- Running the SQL 2008 Project Wizard
The fix turned out to be resetting the package skip loading flag. It seems a number of add-ins were not being loaded on startup. This command is run from the “Visual Studio 2008 Command Prompt” by typing
devenv /resetskippkgs
I also had problems trying to run tests using the standard Microsoft Test tools within Visual Studio. I got the error “Exception has been thrown by the target of an invocation”, but running tests using TestDriven.NET worked fine. This problem was not fixed with the /resetskippkgs. However, turns out it is a known issues if VS2008 SP1 and TFS, KB980216. The quick fix is to make sure I was connected to a TFS server. Once this was done the test could be run. There is a hotfix, but I can live without I think for now.
So the moral is, even if you don’t use an IDE everyday you can still break it with all the patching you do around it for other IDEs and underlying frameworks. A reset to defaults can often by just the kick it needs to get it working.