We have recently been doing a .Net CF project, where the device doesn't connect to the development PC using Activesync, but is connected via WiFi or even Infra Red.

Peter had a problem trying to deploy the project, and kept getting the message 'An operation was attempted on something that is not a socket.' This was despite the fact that nothing in the infrastructure had changed.

We briefly chatted about it, and decided to come back to it. I made some mods to the code, attempted to deploy, and lo-and-behold I got the message 'An operation was attempted on something that is not a socket.'. I did the usual things:-

Reboot PC
Reboot Device
Connect to device
FTP To device

Connecting to the device succeeded, as did FTP, but as soon as I tried to deploy, I got the error message. At that point I could no longer connect to the device. After some diligent 'Googling', and starting to look at the 101000 results,  I came across a several people with the same problem, several suggestions, but no real answers. One solution was to re-install the OS, and Visual Studio - a bit drastic considering our deadlines.

Then I hit pay dirt - try deleting the target folder on the device, and then deploy. Bingo - it worked. I emailed this suggestion to Peter, and it solved the problem. Hope this helps someone else in the future - and is easier to find.

Originally posted 30/Jun/2010