Visual Studio 2010 - Cannot Register Assembly

Question

I am running Visual Studio 2010 on a Windows 7 VM and trying to build a fairly large solution. When I try to do so, I get the error:

Cannot register assembly "C:\Development\ProjectName\Source\bin\Debug\AssemblyName.dll" - access denied.  Please make sure you're running the application as administrator.  Access is denied.  (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80070005 (E_ACCESSDENIED))

I have taken the following steps:

Confirmed that I am in fact running Visual Studio 2010 as administrator.
Restarted the VM.
Confirmed that the assembly does exist exactly where Visual Studio is looking for it.
Confirmed that administrator has full control over the relevant file.
Cleaned and rebuilt the project (multiple times).

I have also found that building the project which creates AssemblyName.dll, manually registering it with RegAsm, and then building the project which requires AssemblyName.dll does not result in an error, but this is not a desirable workaround as it requires manual control. Can anyone give me some advice on how to solve this problem?

Many thanks.

Did you check which identity the application pool uses when running in IIS? Maybe this identity doesn't have enough rights? — Cerveser, May 27 '14 at 13:56
This is not a web application - I'm not certain that it interacts with IIS at all. — CosmicComputer, May 27 '14 at 14:19
Is it a Windows Forms application? did you try to run in Release mode? Also is it targeting the right CPU x86/x64, see solution=>properties — Cerveser, May 27 '14 at 15:13
Post the *complete* error message, copy/paste it from the Output window. — Hans Passant, May 27 '14 at 15:17
That *is* the complete error message; only the file names/paths have been changed. — CosmicComputer, May 27 '14 at 15:21

score 24 · Answer 1 · edited Sep 07 '18 at 17:47

24

This particular issue happens when you are building an assembly project which has the 'Register for COM interop' checked under the Compile tab of the project properties. As Stephane said, you must right click -> Run as Administrator in order for it to register automatically.

If you already have the compiled assembly from a different machine, you can alternatively register it manually and reference the compiled assembly with the project to by-pass the issue.

edited Sep 07 '18 at 17:47

StayOnTarget

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answered Oct 11 '16 at 20:24

J. Thompson

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But the OP specifically said they are running as admin, and still get the error. – StayOnTarget Sep 07 '18 at 17:48
This is the info I was REALLY trying to find. I just needed to understand WHY Visual Studio was trying to register the DLL during build! Thank you! – Joe Irby Apr 12 '19 at 17:34

score 3 · Answer 2 · answered Nov 26 '14 at 15:22

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When you ran VS2010, did you right-click and select "Run as administrator"? If not, it actually runs as a lower priviledged user. Once I selected "Run as administrator", this problem went away.

answered Nov 26 '14 at 15:22

Stephane

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StayOnTarget · Answer 3 · 2018-09-07T17:57:35.550

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I also ran into this error even though I was running VS 2015 as administrator.

In my case I found that manually cleaning up (ie deleting) bin\Debug\*.* for the project resolved the issue. Apparently some kind of file permissions or something was preventing the operation, and the error message may have been incorrect.

I'm not sure what was causing the file 'conflict' in the first place.

edited Sep 07 '18 at 17:57

answered Sep 07 '18 at 17:51

StayOnTarget

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In my case I deleted the entire tree below *.\bin* in both projects - and Success!. – Pieter Geerkens Oct 09 '18 at 09:44

score 0 · Answer 4 · answered Jun 26 '20 at 12:11

Similar to what UuDdLrLrSs said, when I tried to clear the bin folder, Windows gave an error on file access. Apparently another process was using the file - in my case, Microsoft Access.

After closing the associated program that had a file handle, the project built fine. (Although I'm still a little confused as to why it had a file handle on debug assemblies...)

Visual Studio 2010 - Cannot Register Assembly

4 Answers4