Does executable file get created if Build Solution fails with some error in Visual Studio for c#?
Does Build Solution has to succeed in order to create executable file for the application in Visual Studio?
Thanks,
Ilya
This is actually a good question. The answer is: it depends.
There is a difference between "build" and "compile".
The "build" does a lot of work, like finding all the source files, resolving any references to assemblies and NuGet packages, and so forth.
The "compile" takes all those as inputs and produces an output assembly.
If the "compile" fails, then no output is produced (e.g. no .dll or .exe file).
However the "build" may fail after a successful "compile" (for example, if a post-build step fails) in which case the output file is created even though the build fails.
In 99.9999% of cases, a failed build means no output was produced, but it is not always the case.
Related
I'm having a hard time trying to build a F# project in Visual Studio that has dependencies downloaded with Paket. It raises several of the following errors (with different dlls each time):
Could not resolve this reference. Could not locate the assembly "XPlot.Plotly.dll". Check to make sure the assembly exists on disk. If this reference is required by your code, you may get compilation errors. (Code=MSB3245)
For this very example, visual studio adds the option -r:C:\projects\StarWars-social-network-master\packages\XPlot.Plotly\lib\net45\XPlot.Plotly.dll. The file actually exists in my filesystem, so I don't know what I am doing wrong. Can anyone point me to a workaround?
Thank you.
From the directory name, I guess you're looking at Evelina Gabasova's Star Wars network analysis.
As far as I can tell, the project uses F# Script files and so you do not need to compile it at all. It is designed to be used with F# Interactive. Once you open the project, you can look at the individual script files *.fsx, select blocks of code and run them interactively - If you are using Visual Studio, this is done using Alt+Enter - other editors use either this or Ctrl+Enter (Xamarin Studio).
Many F# data analysis scripts follow this pattern - you're not really building a project that needs to be compiled and executed as a whole, so running bits of code from script files immediately makes a lot more sense in this context.
I upgraded to Visual Studio 2013 after using VS 2012.
In VS 2012, when created new Test Project and add files to be "Copy Always" the visual studio copied them into bin/debug and while running the current directory(Environment.CurrentDirectory) was "bin/debug".
In VS 2013 the current directory is "TestResults/something+guid" and VS 2013 is not copying the files to this folder so an "file not found" exception thrown.
How do I change back the current directory to bin/debug in VS2013 to be like VS 2012?
Thanks!
The proper way to handle this scenario is to use DeploymentItemAttribute or test settings config to include the file(s) you want. It is this way because not all tests require the same files, different tests may require different configs entirely, or you may have several test runs and would need to inspect test artifacts to understand why one run failed and another succeeded (where the only difference was a referenced assembly, or a loose file.) Further, when run in a hosted environment (Team Foundation Server, for example) this same pattern is used on the agent server(s), writing a test to set current directory would fail when run on something like a TFS test agent.
As an aside, the path you see during a test is not actually VS2013, it's the MS Test Agent itself (a second process runs tests for sandboxing purposes, I beleive it has been this was since VS2010.)
It sounds like you have an additional problem, all but guaranteed to be one of the following. Without seeing the exception detail I'm making a best guess, these are in order of likelihood:
You have a loose file such as "test.txt" included in your test project and you have a DeploymentItemAttribute decorating your test method. But the "Copy to output folder" setting for "test.txt" is set to "Do not copy".
Changing this setting, rebuilding, then retesting should work.
You have a missing assembly reference, likely for a non-BCL assembly (or, more specifically, you're missing a reference to an assembly which is referenced by an assembly you are referencing.)
To fix this problem you should load fuslogvw.exe and use the log data to discover any missing assembly reference(s) to your test project.
You have referenced a native DLL or assembly which is compiled for a specific processor architecture (x86 vs x64 vs MSIL) and it cannot be loaded within the processor architecture which MS Test Agent is running.
The solution to this is to use an assembly with the correct processor architecture when running the test.
Between project references, "Copy to output directory" setting, and [DeploymentItem], your tests should be finding the file(s) they rely on.
Let me know if you need more info, if you're still having a problem i would suggest editing the question to include the exception detail (or at least the parts that matter, such as Type, Message and the first 5 lines of StackTrace.)
It seems that since VS2010 and MSBuild 4.0, VisualStudio and MSBuild are able to resolve and build project references that are not located within the solution.
Let us create an example to be more concrete. Create a solution called Solution1 with a C# project named A and another project called B. In project B, add a reference to project A. Now create a new solution called Solution2 and click "Add Existing project" and select Project B. There is a warning that can be seen in Solution Explorer and the Warning List.
The trick is that even with "warning as error" we are able to build Solution2.sln. Actually, project A is found
and built by Visual Studio or MSBuild. Let us verify this by opening a VS2010/VS2012 command line and execute the following commands:
msbuild <dirPathToSolution1> Solution1.sln /t:clean **cleaning up solution1 with project A"
msbuild <dirPathToSolution1> Solution2.sln /t:build
ProjectA is effectively built and worse: the warning mentioned above is not even raised there. With previous versions of Visual Studio such situation could not happen (I have tested it with msbuild 3.5 and VS2008).
However, in our situation we would like to prevent such things. Indeed, we have a large source repository with several solutions and many committers. We are reorganizing our dependencies aiming finally to the extraction of smaller repositories. Meanwhile, we do not want developers to add hidden project dependencies without seeing it. We would like to allow only project references "inside" a solution, leaving other dependencies to assembly references.
So the question is "Is there a way, to prevent such solution such as Solution2 to build ?". Ideally, it should not compile with both VS2012 and MSBuild. However a solution involving only the MSBuild command line would do thanks to our Continous Integration.
edit I checked Microsoft.Common.Targets and there does not seem any way to achieve what you want. Either project references are built, or they are not (this is for instance influenced by the BuildProjectReferences flag of my original answer). There is no way to build them selectively depending on which solution they are in unless I'm missing something - which is mainly because project references are set on the project level, not on the solution level: in your project file there is an MsBuild ItemGroup named ProjectReferences and that is used. (Actually this makes some sense: if you ask MsBuild to build projectB.csproj, and B says it references A, then no solution comes into play and you could expect it to build A, after all you are referencing it).
Now as I understand it, you want to prohibit referencing across directories whose structure happens to be represented by solutions. If that is the case, and you really need this, you could probably get away with a tool that parses the MsBuild log and looks for lines like
Project "somedir\projectB.csproj" (2) is building "someOtherDir\projectA.csproj" (3) ...
then extract the directory info from it and make the tool raise an error when they do not match. Then incorporate the tool in your CI server and feed it with the msbuild log files.
original answer
Try with /p:BuildProjectReferences=false on the command line. As the name suggests it will disable building of referenced projects. When building solution1, this should not be a problem since projectA will be built anyway as it is in the solution. However when building solution2, it won't build projectA and you'll get a build error.
I am trying to build MSIs in a TFS Build by shelling out to DEVENV.exe (since MSBUILD does not support VSPROJs). In any case, my first installer project builds fine, the second one fails. If I reverse the order, same thing happends (i.e. the error does not follow the project). Looking at the output, I get the following errors:
Deserializing the project state for project '[MyProject].dbproj'
[MyProject].dbproj : error : Error HRESULT E_FAIL has been returned from a call to a COM component.
Also, I get:
Package 'Microsoft.VisualStudio.TestTools.TestCaseManagement.QualityToolsPackage, Microsoft.VisualStudio.QualityTools.TestCaseManagement, Version=10.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a' failed to load
It looks as though the first build tries to serialize the DB project (and it says it succeeds, but there is no DBML file anywhere). Then the second build tries to deserialize the DB project and fails.
I've tried resetting env settings (using the /resetusersettings flag) as well as using the /resetskippkgs flag. Nothing works.
Any ideas?
When you shell out to DevEnv, are you building that specific project (.vdproj file), or are you building the solution? It sounds like VS is trying to open the solution on the build machine and the database and test project systems aren't present.
Have you considered porting your setup project to WiX?
Start simple. Unless you're well versed in the problem you're trying to solve it's usually best to try it "by hand" before getting it running as part of a TFS build. RDP into the build server and try running the necessary commands at the command line and see what happens. You can even go simpler than that and RDP into the build machine and load Visual Studio and build it.
Bottom line is that if you can't get it to build within Visual Studio or at the command line by calling devenv.exe it won't work as part of the team build.
I am using the below Exec task to do precisely what you are doing as part of a TFS build. So I know this works. Your platform and configuration may vary depending on what you're building. The nice thing about this is that you'll have a log file at C:\Temp\MSIBuildOutputLog.txt that you can analyze for additional errors and information.
<Exec Command=""C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\Common7\IDE\devenv.exe" "$(PathToSolution)\solution.sln" /Build "Release|Mixed Platforms" /out "C:\Temp\MSIBuildOutputLog.txt"" />
One important thing to note... There is a bug in VS2010 which causes MSI generation to fail when you try to run it at the command line using devenv.exe. This took me days to find and figure out, but you need this hotfix. Worked like a charm...
http://archive.msdn.microsoft.com/KB2286556
Actually it's the deployment projects that don't support msbuild. FWIW, this is all deprecated in the next release of Visual Studio so you might want to start looking at InstallShield Limited Edition and/or Windows Installer XML now before spending too much time on dead end, broken technology. Both of these alternatives have proper MSBuild support aswell as many other improvements.
It would be perhaps better and quicker to adopt WIX (Windows Installer XML) which is the technology MS now recommends to use within VS/MSBuild/TFSBuild environment to crate MSIs.
It is relatively easy to setup and integrate within your VS Solutions. It uses XML based files to describe your MSIs and uses these files to create your MSIs when you compile.
I would start by downloading Wix from http://wix.codeplex.com/
Once installed you would be able to use the VS2010 integration of Wix based projects to create MSIs. To get started quickly simply add a new Wix project to your solution and reference the projects whose output you wish to combine into an MSI. Next you can run a tool called "Heat" which is included with Wix toolkit to generate the XML files by scanning your projects.
Once you have these XML files, add them to your Wix project and compile.
I have a solution with several web application projects in it. After all the projects have been built I need to run an MSBUILD script.
What I used to do was call the script from one of the existing projects (through <Target Name="AfterBuild"> in the .csproj file). However, I had to make sure I used the project that built last, and if the build order ever changed I would get unexpected results.
So, I decided to make an empty web application project, and set the project dependencies so that it always built last, then attach the MSBUILD script to this.
So now it always runs at the right time, but I get an extra (tiny) assembly as a result of the supposedly empty project being built. There are no code files in the project (except AssemblyInfo.cs), but an assembly is always produced.
So, is there either a way to stop the assembly being built, or maybe a way to attach the MSBUILD script to the solution as a whole and avoid this dummy project altogether?
In MSBuild 4.0 there are two new hooks that can be used to run scripts before and after a solution is built. When running MSBuild on a solution file, it will look for two target files in the solution directory:
before.SolutionName.sln.targets
after.SolutionName.sln.targets
If any of those files is found, it will automatically be executed at the proper stage.
In your case, in order to run a script after all the projects in the solution have been built, you could create an after.MySolution.sln.targets file with a Target like:
<Target Name="RunPostBuildScripts" AfterTargets="Build">
<MSBuild Projects="PostBuild.targets" />
</Target>
See also:
Extending the solution build
I don't have enough reputation points to comment on the Enrico's accepted answer so I will just comment here that this doesn't work when you run the build in Visual Studio 2010 itself. It does work when MSBuild is run as a command-line.