Happy New Year to all of you! I hope that my blog will keep helping you solve problems that are really tough to find.
Recently I bumped into a very strange problem when I tried to open a fresh new solution from the source control and then I got a strange error – Microsoft Visual Studio – System.Runtime.InteropServices.COMException:
I wonder what the Cancel button will do here, but that is a different story.
A quick look at Solution Explorer, showed that all projects were loaded successfully except one – a Web Application Project.
I put some time to dig in with WinDbg and then I got some tips on what is going on.
In order to load the Web Application Project you must make sure that the URL that the project is using, is valid and can be resolved. This can happen pretty often since when you download a project from source control for the first time, it is highly unlikely that you will have the web site already set up.
And important note that I have to make also is that if you are running Vista, you should run in elevated privileges as well.
Using Web Application Projects is not really my choice for web site development. I would rather choose the new Web Site model. I hope that I will have the time to go further into this topic here.
The problem is reported to Microsoft and will be fixed in VS2008 SP1 (no date has been announced yet).