Brian On Software

In my projects, I often have to copy some files in either a pre-build or post-build event within Visual Studio.  Since installing Windows 7, it seems that the copy command from those build events generates an error with a not very helpful message such as the following one:

The “..exited with code 1” leaves me dreaming about a ton of causes for this error. When manually copying the file to the destination directory (as copying AmazonBookLinker.dll to C:\Program Files\Windows Live\Writer\Plugins\) via Windows Explorer, I get the following second strike:

At this point, I’m playing around with security permissions for both files and destination directory without any positive result.  The solution I came about this problem is to actually run Visual Studio with administrator privileges by right-clicking your Visual Studio file icon, and selecting “Run as administrator”. If you want to make this a permanent solution:

1. Open the properties window for Visual Studio
2. Go to the Compatibility tab
3. Under the “Privilege Level” box, check the “Run this program as an administrator”
4. Click on OK
5. [Optionally] Click on the “Change settings for all users” button apply this privilege to all users on the machine.