Team Build Errors May Not Always Be What They Seem
I ran into an issue yesterday in which I had a freshly minted team build failing on 1 specific project. I reached out to others with the comments below hoping someone could help me. It turns out despite my last statement in the post about being at a total loss that I was not at all in such a loss but had already identified the issue in the post itself. Errors 1-5 were indeed phantom errors. Phantom errors- you know those errors we see that though they should have nothing to do with another error try to pass themselves off as in an error condition until you clear up the "real" and totally unrelated error. Those phantom errors just melt away then and say to you - "oh sorry, I'm really not erroring after all. Must have had a touch of whatever has been going around". So it was. I walked in this morning fixed the 6th reported error that I knew was legitimate and ran a team build. A feeling in my gut told me it would come out clean. The build ran clean.
So... for others out there. If you run across something like this hopefully you'll stumble into my post. Look for the real error and see what happens from there.
This one is killing me. I have a Team Build that is running against a solution. There is nothing overloaded or anything special about it. It's plain jane from the VS 2005 Team Build Type. One project in the solution is causing the build to die and giving me a strange build log message to go with it. This is a large solution with many projects. What it is trying to do would have likely been done in any of the projects that were compiled prior to this one. The message is below with a few comments of things to note then my plea for any insight from anyone:
C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\Microsoft.Common.targets(3090,13): error MSB3073: The command "mkdir "c:\TFSBuild\Source Archive\JHNet Master\Binaries\Debug\Transforms"
C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\Microsoft.Common.targets(3090,13): error MSB3073: copy "c:\TFSBuild\Source Archive\JHNet Master\Sources\Web Sites\JH\Main\JH.Messaging.Conductor\Transforms\*.*" "c:\TFSBuild\Source Archive\JHNet Master\Binaries\Debug\Transforms\*.*"
C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\Microsoft.Common.targets(3090,13): error MSB3073:
C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\Microsoft.Common.targets(3090,13): error MSB3073: mkdir "c:\TFSBuild\Source Archive\JHNet Master\Binaries\Debug\Schemas"
C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\Microsoft.Common.targets(3090,13): error MSB3073: copy "c:\TFSBuild\Source Archive\JHNet Master\Sources\Web Sites\JH\Main\JH.Messaging.Conductor\Schemas\*.*" "c:\TFSBuild\Source Archive\JHNet Master\Binaries\Debug\Schemas\*.*"
C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\Microsoft.Common.targets(3090,13): error MSB3073:
C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\Microsoft.Common.targets(3090,13): error MSB3073: copy "c:\TFSBuild\Source Archive\JHNet Master\Sources\Web Sites\JH\Main\Binary References\ADF\ABCadfCE5.dll" "c:\TFSBuild\Source Archive\JHNet Master\Binaries\Debug\ABCadfCE5.dll"" exited with code 1.
Done building target "PostBuildEvent" in project "JH.Messaging.Conductor.csproj" -- FAILED.
A few things to note:
notice that in the first error there is a very questionable double quote mark preceeding the mkdir that is not matched
The second error makes sense - the target directory doesn't exist due to the first error
The Third and sixth error: well it's a bit sparse in wording isn't it
The fourth error gives the same mkdir error but without the suspicious double quote
The fifth error like the second error makes sense to me
The sixth error.... hmm... looking at it. It's actually 100% legit. I know that file in that source location does not exist. (I certainly hope the other errors aren't phantoms that disappear when I fix error 6). But notice it does have an extra ending double quote. hmm...
This is occuring as a post build event but one auto performed as part of Microsoft.Common.targets based on the project's structure. There is no customization to any part of this build.
Any ideas. I'm at a total loss.