I have the following warning when building some of my class library csprojs:
C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2017\Professional\MSBuild\15.0\Bin\Microsoft.Common.CurrentVersion.targets(2110,5): warning MSB3101: Could not write state file "..\..\tmp\dotnet\anvil.controls\obj\vs2017\net461\debug
\anvil.controls.vs2017.net461.csprojAssemblyReference.cache". The file 'E:\anvil\Anvil.Controls\tmp\dotnet\anvil.controls\obj\vs2017\net461\debug\Anvil.Controls.vs2017.net461.csprojAssemblyReference.cache' already exists. [E:\anvil\Anvil.Controls\src\anvil.controls\anvil.controls.vs2017.net461.csproj]
I've tried using msbuild 15.0 (VS2017 and Standalone 2.2.103) and 16.0.
Same warning in Visual Studio 2017 and JetBrains.Rider
Does not happen if I wipe my temp folder. Then happens in subsequent builds or even rebuilds.
Happens to a subset of my projects, only similarity I can see is that they are all projects that contain .xaml files. But it doesn't happen on all projects with .xaml files.
Happens when I use -maxcpucount:1 (to disable parallel build).
Each project has a unique tmp/intermediate folder, set to this: ..\..\tmp\dotnet\ubisoft.controls\<bin|obj>\vs2017\net45\<debug|release>\
Any ideas what might affect this error in my projects?
Sometimes 'mysterious warnings' (and errors) come from too long paths. Try to use a shorter output path, i.e.
E:\build\Anvil.Controls\tmp\net461\debug\
instead of
E:\anvil\Anvil.Controls\tmp\dotnet\anvil.controls\obj\vs2017\net461\debug\
See this answer as well
Related
The 'template' for the new project is MFC Dynamic Link Library. The problem seems to boil down to Visual Studio looking for the folder "C:\Program Files (x86)\MSBuild\Microsoft.Cpp\v4.0\V140\Platforms\Win32\PlatformToolsets\v142" - which doesn't exist. I have run and re-run the Visual Studio installer - always adding more things for toolset v142, but nothing seems to help. Is there some way to get this folder to appear? With the right stuff in it?
In reality, I am upgrading an existing project from umpteen versions back to be compiled with VS 2019. Because I could not get it to compile, I tried to create a new project to stuff with the files from my old project and the problem occurred before I even added any files to it.
I have done a similar process to compile my project for previous versions of VS, but never had this problem before. Any help appreciated.
To prove your issue, I have made a small test:
1) create a new system environment variable called VCTargetsPath and then set its value to
C:\Program Files (x86)\MSBuild\Microsoft.Cpp\v4.0\V140\
2) then restart VS and also set the the Platfrom Toolset to v142under Project Properties.
3) then rebuild the project and get the same error:
Since you new created project has also the error, so I think you have do some changes to system environment variable.
Also, you should note that this path is for old VS2015.
However, VS2019 uses:
C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2019\Community\MSBuild\Microsoft\VC\v160\Platforms\Win32\PlatformToolsets\v142
You make a change so that it will overwrite the system value for VS2019 which leads to the issue. The value is global and affects all the vs versions on your current PC.
Suggestion
1) You should check your system environment variable and search for VCTargetsPath, if you has this variable, please delete it.
2) or if you have this variable VCTargetsPath, change its value to, or if you do not have it, create it and set its value to VS2019.
So here's the scenario: I have several wix projects that the exact same extra msbuild targets and tasks to automate some very tedious tasks: things like building a help file and authenticode signing the msi and output files using signtool.exe.
Having gotten tired of copying changes to these scripts into 5 different repositories every time I made a fix. So I got clever and I turned them into nuget packages with a .targets file in the build folder. A simple nuget restore turns a laundry list of packages into targets files.
The problem
Wix v3 doesn't like packages. It doesn't support package references so packages.config looks like the thing. Except that visual studio doesn't like packages.config. It will happily restore the packages (into the folder I specified with a nuget.config) but none of the .targets files are automatically imported.
Easy enough to fix: I just added an import statement into my wixproj file. Except that visual studio doesn't automatically re-evaluate the wixproj after running the restore operation. We can work with this, but it is really annoying to have to build, unload the project, reload the project, and rebuild any time the packages change.
So I tried to fix it
I crawled through the log output of a standard C# project build and discovered the Nuget.Targets file, which can be imported into a project to provide pack and restore targets. It also let me convert to packagereferences, which are somewhat more convenient and less messy than packages.config, but I still had to manually add the import statement for the nuget.g.targets and nuget.g.props files that were produced by the restore target.
And, since I had to manually import those files, I'm right back to the build, unload, reload, rebuild workflow.
Attempt number 2
I discovered through intense internet searching that msbuild recently added a /restore flag to their command line utility specifically to force a project re-evaluation after restoring packages. This works on the command line, but visual studio seems to be clueless. (Maybe because of something that wix v3 does behind the scenes in the Visual Studio template?) In any case, they mentioned in the issue notes that they are essentially using an msbuild task with new global properties to force a re-evaluation. So I attempted to add such a step to the pre-build event of my wixproj, but no sauce.
The question
How do I tell visual studio to re-evaluate this wixproj after running restore? Is there some sort of property or item group I need to add to the wixproj? Is there some kind of target I can insert into the build process?
Update 1:
Found a project property that looked promising: UseHostCompilerIfAvailable, but it didn't work. Still got the same problem.
I'm in the process of updating an old solution from Visual Studio 2005 to Visual Studio 2015, and I'm trying to reproduce as much of our old kludgy behavior as we safely can to minimize the downstream effects. I'm currently running into an issue with the Website Property Pages and MSBuild.
The path here is mostly correct, except that we want the configuration used to be in the path as well. So a Debug build will go into E:\Projects\...\PrecompiledWeb\Debug\MyService and a Release build will go into E:\Projects\...\PrecompiledWeb\Release\MyService. Is this doable? Is there a variable I can insert to make that determination when building?
We're using msbuild against the containing solution file (via TeamCity if it matters, but I can replicate it without it).
Edit: I've found the Debug.AspNetCompiler.TargetPath and Release.AspNetCompiler.TargetPath paths in the solution, but if I change them to be separate, the Debug one overrides the Release one when I next open the dialog.
When MSBuild starts building the project, it takes one or several project files. This dialog takes it parameters from MSBuild project file (you can edit it either from Visual Studio, or simply in every text editor). The project should have the property, called $(Configuration). You can use it in your output variable:
<OutputPath>E:\Projects\...\PrecompiledWeb\$(Configuration)\MyService</OutputPath>
One thing you must aware of is that the property $(Configuration) must be declared before the $(OutputPath) property.
When I run my TeamCity build with the only build step being of runner type Visual Studio (sln), I get the following error:
C:\TeamCity\buildAgent\work\4978ec6ee0ade5b4\Test\Code\Test.sln(2, 1): error MSB4025: The project file could not be loaded. Data at the root level is invalid. Line 2, position 1.
This is on a dedicated CI server running TeamCity Professional 8.1.1 (build 29939). There are several other successfully-running builds on this server.
The odd bit is that the same build runs successfully on TeamCity on my dev machine. I followed an answer to a similar question, and copied the specified folders across, but that didn't help.
I'm sure the project/solution file isn't invalid because in addition to the build running on my dev box, I have opened the solution in Visual Studio and built it there with no problems.
Any suggestions?
I just fixed this.
Look inside the Test.sln file for Project or EndProject tags that aren't closed. For us, the EndProject was missing and it broke on teamcity, but no issues in Visual Studio.
It seems the TeamCity error message will occur for any number of root causes. In my case the problem occurred because a line inside the GlobalSection(NestedProjects) section was referring to a project Guid which didn't relate to any project defined in the Solution file.
As with the previous post I didn't have any issues building in Visual Studio. I only got a more helpful error message that allowed me to discover what the real problem was when I built using msbuild.
See https://therightjoin.wordpress.com/2014/07/04/msb4025-the-project-file-could-not-be-loaded-data-at-the-root-level-is-invalid-error-when-building-ssdt-project-in-teamcity for another example, and where using msbuild helped identify the true problem.
In our case, it was a duplicate project reference in the solution file (caused by near simultaneous commits and an automatic merge).
In our situation the problem was specifying a ToolsVersion that was not installed on that machine. (14 which VS2015 has but VS2017 does not have by default)
In my case, after merging, in .sln file, it was a mismatch of lines under
GlobalSection(NestedProjects) = preSolution
{6B971E15-6B61-4AA8-9B93-9639C23269C3} = {9A14E7EF-3FA1-4B9A-B413-C550B3E5AC62}
{54D14F01-D576-4DE6-9404-D21AD0DC4916} = {9A14E7EF-3FA1-4B9A-B413-C550B3E5AC62}
... (was some extra entry here )
...
EndGlobalSection
section. In clear words, there were some extra lines added after merging. So, If you have merged, please compare two solution files manually. You can start with total line numbers in both files.
In another Case
We had a blank lines - so make sure any blank lines are removed!
Hope this helps some else too!
I got this same error with Jenkins. It turns out the root Jenkins folder was set to C:\Program Files (x86)\ and it didn't have write access to bin and obj directories.
Error:
error MSB4025: The project file could not be loaded. Data at the root level is invalid.
I launched cmd as Administrator and ran this:
"C:\Program Files (x86)\MSBuild\14.0\Bin\MSBuild.exe" "C:\Program Files (x86)\Jenkins\workspace\BuildBI_1\Reports\Test\ReportsTests.sln" /t:Build /p:RunOctoPack=true
And that gave me clues about not being able to write to bin and obj.
This worked for me-
You can install Build Tools for Visual Studio 2017, make sure to select C++ tools, Windows 10 SDK and MSBuild and your set.
Use MSBuild to identify the underlying problem:
$> msbuild mysolution.sln
Gave me this beauty with the correct error line number:
If msbuild cannot be accessed like that from the command line / powershell, try to find the MSBuild.exe shipped with VisualStudio, e.g. C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2019\Community\MSBuild\Current\Bin\amd64\MSBuild.exe.
VisualStudio itself seems to be very "tolerant" against errors / inconsistencies in the solution file, so having it open in VS is no guarantee for the sln file being correct.
I fixed it by updating the solution file.
Another possible problem (and resolution): I had a stray unused solution file in my repo, pointing to who-knows-where, and the MSBUILD step in my Azure DevOps pipeline was set to **\*.sln.
When using DefaultTemplate from Visual Sturdio 2012 (and TFS 2012 server), the PDB files are included in build directory. I do not want them.
Is there a way not to generate those files during build process?
Or
How can I delete those files?
I found this thread about deletion but seems a bit strange (no delete activity?)
There also is this answer but does not involve XAML template.
Thanks in advance for your help.
PDB files hold debug information on your code and its not advised to disable them, they are valid output hence deployment shouldn't be messing with them.
You can disable their generation in Visual Studio project Properties> Build > Advanced > Debug Info = none.
If you absolutely want them gone then disable them for build specific configuration (relaese etc.)
The build server by default does whatever the Solution (sln) tells it to. That by default is to do a "Debug" build and that created the PDB's. You can tell the Build to do a "Release" build that will not by default create any PDB's...
Figure: Adding a Build Configuration
I would however recommend against it as the PDB's contain information that you need even in production systems. Consider for a moment that you have a DLL in production and the customer is encountering a problem. You get them to create an InteliTrace log so that you can debug it locally (or they let you debug on their environment) and suddenly you are trying to debug without Visual Studio understanding the relationship between the Executable and the Source Code. So no debug...
Since I was unable to find building option to disable PDB file generation, I delete them afterwards.
There is no easy way to delete files. I did:
use a FindMatchingFiles Activity with wildcard *.pdb, which returns
a full path to pdb files
use a Foreach loop
call a DotNet method in the loop for each file with the InvokeMethod Activity,
with target type System.IO.File and method being "Delete"
In the previous version (Visual Studio 2010)
When we build /release, it was not generating PDBs, the PDB files are created when we only build with /debug:full or /debug:pdbonly, we use /debug:pdbonly if we want to generate PDBs for a release build that we do not want to be debuggable.
This is not the case in Visual Studio 2012, I checked it and I found it generated PDBs in both, /debug and /release
There is no documentation for Visuals Studio 2012.