Error occurred while access Microsoft.Extensions.HostingServices. Could not parse JSON file
It turns out that my appsettings.json was missing a closing curly brace. Adding that in fixed the problem.
Luckily I came across this thread and I'm kicking myself for not taking the error message literally.
There were plenty of hints...
The one reason the error doesn't just **POP** out is because its just a **warning**.
You can change this behavior in Visual Studio
Goto Tools->Options.
Click Text Editor->JSON->Advanced.
Under Validation change Show errors as warnings to False
You still get the same message on the console..But this change makes the error a little more dramatic that there is an issue.
The issue for me is that I had a typo in my user secrets secrets.json file. I was missing a comma after a property value.
For reference, you can edit user secrets in VS2019 by right-clicking on a .NET Core project and selecting Manage User Secrets.