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I've taken the plunge and upgraded (or maybe downgraded?!) from WinXP to Vista.

Everything appeared to be working ok except that when I fired up my machine this morning and opened my C# application in Visual Studio I got a few "Load of property 'OutputPath' failed. The entered path is not a valid output path" errors.

I tried to rebuild the application and found that for some mysterious reason I'd lost access to the executables that Visual Studio creates. Everything else in the solution was still mine, but the compilation results weren't. In some cases the 'Administrator' owned them, and in some cases I still owned them but had no rights.

I'm running as Administrator, so to be denied access to my own files that I created myself is more than a little infuriating.

Have I missed something in the way Visual Studio and Vista play together, or do I wipe the machine and burn another two days reinstalling WinXP?

Andrew
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  • Our IT folks installed Vista on one of our new developer's workstations. After spending a day trying to figure out why he couldn't access any of the projects he checked out from TFS, we bit the bullet, wiped it, and installed XP. Happy ever since. – tvanfosson Nov 13 '08 at 01:33
  • @tvanfosson: I've been using Vista x64 without ANY issues whatsoever. One of the strudiest Windows OSs I've used. Hey, but may be I'm one helluva lucky guy ;) We do need a modern - latest - OS to leverage all cores of hightech processors (Quad Core was hightech a year and half ago) & memory (4GB) – Vyas Bharghava Nov 13 '08 at 17:52
  • @vyas totally, totally off-topic, but aside from these issues I'm tending to agree. Vista does seem to work pretty well. It's much better at multitasking this dual-core laptop than XP ever was. We'll soon have something as sturdy as OS/2 version 1.3. – Andrew Nov 13 '08 at 20:08

3 Answers3

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On top of my head:

  1. Disable User Access Control.
  2. Make sure you've not checked in your executables into source control (they may be readonly) :)

EDIT: I'd few problems on my Vista x64 box that got me confused as well [I was also running as Administrator]. Disabling UAC got rid of this 'Administrator' but not an Administrator problems :D

Vyas Bharghava
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  • If developers insist on running with UAC disabled, then we shall never make any progress. – Will Dean Nov 13 '08 at 01:46
  • Maybe UAC should have been developed properly before being implemented then? I'm not going to suggest to a user that they should use broken software. – Malfist Nov 13 '08 at 02:06
  • I'm assuming this has been voted down because it advocates disabling UAC. From my past experience with Vista UAC is a complete trainwreck, and having disabled it on this install has proved that again since the problem has disappeared. – Andrew Nov 13 '08 at 04:55
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    @Will: I'm not sure what UAC accomplishes except ask user permission to proceed (which the user may not have the foggiest about). Vista is a tool in the end and must serve users' needs. If disabling UAC gets something done, so be it. And hey, we're talking about developers here. – Vyas Bharghava Nov 13 '08 at 17:46
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Open your .csproj file and make sure your output path C:\test\ is correct that one more place to check.

  • I ran into this problem, and indeed it turned out the .csproj file had the wrong outputpath in it - the GUI in the settings pane did not persist the changes for some reason. – Tom Lianza Jun 26 '11 at 19:41
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Oh.. this is a cool one =D

have you tried to change your output path?

Well, click on the right button on your project in the "solution explorer". Go on properties, in the Build tab. There you can try to work some things out..

VS2008 is a very strange thing, since it was developed to run in Vista! =D

good luck!

José Leal
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