Visual Studio "Could not copy" .... during build

c# visual-studio-2012 build process
bradgonesurfing picture bradgonesurfing · Aug 7, 2013 · Viewed 326.7k times · Source

I keep getting this error during the build of my VS2012 C# project

Error   41  Could not copy "obj\Debug\WeinGartner.WeinCad.exe" to
 "bin\Debug\WeinGartner.WeinCad.exe". 
 Exceeded retry count of 10. Failed.    


Error   42  Unable to copy file "obj\Debug\WeinGartner.WeinCad.exe" to
"bin\Debug\WeinGartner.WeinCad.exe". The process cannot access the file
'bin\Debug\WeinGartner.WeinCad.exe' because it is being used by another 
process.

Now I've figured out that killing the process

Weingartner.WeinCad.vhost.exe

works (sometimes ) but this is getting on my nerves. Any way to stop this happening at all?

My debugger settings are

enter image description here enter image description here

Answer

Gerard picture Gerard · Oct 31, 2013

I have encountered similar error messages in Visual Studio 2013.

Mostly, I have found that this situation has occurred when a debug process was halted because of an exception.

When clean+build has not resolved this problem for me, I have had success by doing the following:

  • Closing Visual Studio
  • Deleting the bin and obj folders, and
  • Reopening Visual Studio.

This "bug" has existed since Visual Studio 2003.

Finally, I have also found that I can often overcome this problem by simply renaming the executable file and then deleting it.

Related questions

Is there a format code shortcut for Visual Studio?

In Eclipse there is a shortcut, Ctrl+Shift+F, that re-indents code and fixes comments and blank lines. Is there an equivalent for Visual Studio 2010?

Read More
How to reference Microsoft.Office.Interop.Excel dll?

I had developed a system that deals with excel sheets in 2006 using MS VS 2005. Now, I can not use the same reference with MS VS 2012. var app = new Microsoft.Office.Interop.Excel.Application(); Workbooks wbs = app.Workbooks;

Read More
OWIN Startup Class Missing

I'm getting this error as my project is not able to find the reference for OWIN startup class. I've even installed all the OWIN reference packages through Nuget still getting the same issue. I'm using Visual Studio 2012 and MVC4. The …

Read More