Weird Visual Studio 2008 behaviour: build failed, no error message!!?

Question

EDIT: It's VS 2008 NOT VS 2005. Sorry for the typo.

While trying to build two fairly big projects solution on Visual Studio 2008 (2 projects: 6686 files), and after making sure that everything is OK, my projects wouldn't build. VS informs me that the build failed but it doesn't tell me what I'm erring!? I tried cleaning, rebuilding, rebooting, almost everything. Ideas?

EDIT2: Problem solved, but ...
I moved the project over to another directory, then moved it back again to the same old directory, and magically it worked! :S No idea what was wrong though :S

Answer 1

When you say cleaning, you mean Right Clicking on the Solutions and clicking Clean Solutions?

Have you tried removing all the built dlls from the Bin folder manually and making sure no other running applications have files open.

Not sure if its sill an issue with VS, but files or folders starting with a "." can cause problems. eg if SubVersion is not set to use "_svn" instead of ".svn"

HTH

Answer 2

Try moving the project root the root of the drive. I had run into an issue with a very large project where the path length was so long it had started to cause issues.

So rather than:

c:\My Documents and Settings\user\My Documents\Projects\MyProject

do this:

c:\MyProject

Answer 3

Sometimes you get better error messages if you track down the build command (its in the output windows) and looks like

E:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v3.5\Csc.exe /noconfig /nowarn:1701,1702 /errorrep...blah..blah

Then run that manually at the command line.

Also, the output window tends to have better information, even though Visual Studios default behavior is to show the "Errors List" window after a failed build.

Answer 4

Hi,

if you are using Javascript codes or files + there are errors in these codes;

Visual Studio 2005 doesnt have the ability to debug them.but they added Javascript Debugging Feature in Visual STudio 2008.Maybe you should re-debug it in VS2008

If you are sure there are no Javascript errors or you didnt use Javascript codes & files,Visual Studio Team Edition has some nice *new project types.

If you create a new Test Project on your current project & then add an Unit Test,theres a high oppurtunity that you can see the errors.

If there are other details about your project situation,let us know

Cheers

Ibrahim Ersoy

Answer 5

Most likely you have a missing reference or potentially you are referencing something from the GAC that is not installed on your build server.

I would start by deleting the project completely from my local file system then do a force get-latest from TFS to rebuild the project directory.

Once done, I would try to build the project. If there is a failure, go fix it.

If there isn't a failure, I would look through ALL of the referenced assemblies to ensure that any third party items are not pointing to the GAC. MS ones are okay.. Provided you have the same service pack level between your machine and the build server.

If you still haven't found it, I would then move to remoting into the build server and trying to compile it from the Visual Studio that's installed on it.

As a potential other issue, if this is a web application (not a web site), then I would delete the designer file associated with that page it breaks on, right click on the .aspx file and select "convert to web application" This will recreate the designer file.. and give you any error messages associated with it.

Answer 6

I'd check the output window and search for the keyword "unable". When you find what it was unable to do, you'll most likely know how to fix it. It can sometimes be really silly things, like aspx pages that refer to code-behind files that don't exist and annoying stuff like that.

Answer 7

Well, obviously there's no logic that I know in the following answer, but it worked after I moved the project to another directory and then moved it back to its original directory again.
Thanks anyway guys