“Exception Occurred” while refreshing setup project dependencies

A few days ago to make a build for a desktop project, I tried to refresh dependencies of a setup project, and encountered an exception with message “The operation could not be completed. Exception occurred”.

I closed the solution and then re-opened the solution to refresh dependencies again but again I saw the same error message. I searched the exception and have found some related problems and their solutions. Fortunately I found a thread on MSDN forums that pointed to a related thread on dotnet247.com which helped resolved my issue. As per the suggestion of the Good Answer on the page at dotnet247.com, I followed these two simple steps:

• Removed the Primary Output of the Entry Project from File System view of the setup project.
• Re-added the Primary Output of the Entry Project in the File System view of the setup project.

and voilà… the issue was resolved :)

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