Why does Publish fail in VS2008 without an error message?

Question

I have a web application that I am trying to build and publish. The odd thing is that when I do clean, build or rebuild everything seems fine. When I do a publish though I get the message that the publish failed, but get no further information:

========== Publish: 0 succeeded, 1 failed, 0 skipped ==========

If in the copy section I select "All files in the source project folder" it works fine, but if I select "Only files needed to run this application" or "All project files" I get the message that it failed, but without any further information.

I am using subversion and if I copy (export) the project and open it outside of source control it does appear to publish correctly. Is there some known interaction with subversion that doesn't let this occur correctly? Is there a work around to get the "Only files needed to run this application" with subversion?

Thanks for any assistance

Answer 1

Output window (Ctrl+Alt+O) shows informational messages and errors during publish. Do you have differences between lines

------ Publish started:

and

========== Publish: 0 succeeded, 1 failed, 0 skipped ==========

in all mentioned cases?

Answer 2

Hi,

I had the same problem using Subversion and Ankh installed, after removing Ankh, publish now works again, though I do not kow what makes Ankh hinder the publishing process

Regards

Andreas

Answer 3

Same thing happens to my project: the publish folder is under svn control and if I select "Only files needed to run this application" or "All project files" then publish will fail.

I suspect VS attempts to delete all files "not needed to run this application" or at least attempts to do something SVN does not approve. VS will not get permission to write to the disk and publish will fail (w/out error message, just says "Failed").

The only solution I found was to do a SVN Clean/Update on the publish folder, close VS and open it again. The publishing will work :-(

Answer 4

Ankh seems to cause some issues. I found that you have to open visual studio, then disable Ankh by going to Tools -> Options -> Source Control -> Choose None as the Current source control plugin. Then close visual studio and re-open it. Then publish seems to work...

Answer 5

I had exactly the same problem, however it was soon solved thanks to Alexander Prokofyev's reply, Ctrl+Alt+O) soon found that there were some deleted images which the project was trying to publish.

Answer 6

same problem... resolved! (the deleted images) thanks!

Answer 7

Yes, all publish messages appear in the Output window. You can also open it by selecting "Output" from the "View" menu.