Visual Studio 2017 – Issue with Adding a reference (The operation could not be completed)

Hi guys,

I faced today a new issue with Visual Studio when trying to add a refence to one of my projects in the same solution.

I checked the build status, everything built properly without issue, however, whenever I tried to add a reference I got an error message saying that “The operation could not be completed.”

The solution

1- Run the Developer Command Prompt for VS 2017

2- Browse to 

C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2017\Enterprise\Common7\IDE\PublicAssemblies

3- Register the following assembly to the GAC

gacutil -i Microsoft.VisualStudio.Shell.Interop.11.0.dll

4- Restart Visual Studio IDE

5- Tadaaa !!!