The old ‘Mutex could not be created’ error
I have been doing some development in a new Visual Studio 2008 environment and was trying to debug my web service that I had created. As this was a new environment some of the security settings needed to be configured to allow me to run in DEBUG mode. After settings these permissons and starting my web service again I was still getting debug errors so I browsed the ASMX file from within IIS and got a ‘Mutex could not be created’ error within IE.
As with most of these errors I am not the first person to encounter the problem but I thought it was worth mentioning that this solution worked for me;
- Close down all open Visual Studio IDE’s
- Go to the ASP.NET Temporary folder for the version of the framework under which your application pool is running. For my web service running as a ASP.NET 2.0 application this is located at <%systemroot%>Microsoft.NetFrameworkv2.0.50727Temporary ASP.NET Files.
- Delete the folder for your application.
- Reset IIS
- Check that you can now browse to your page, or web service, using IE.
- Then reopen your solution within the development environment.
Problem solved! No more Mutex errors and I could debug my web service in my development enviroment. If you are interested, there is a useful Wikipedia article on Mutual Exclusion.
