MSBuild publish stopped working out of nowhere - deployment

For a very long time the following command worked as expected:
msbuild /property:Configuration=Release /property:TransformConfigFiles=true /property:DeployOnBuild=true /property:PublishProfile=FolderProfile /verbosity:normal /target:Rebuild /fileLogger /nologo /m Ticket.Corporativo.sln
By "expected" I mean, the project is built, then "packaged" into a "pkg" folder according to a publish profile called "FolderProfile" which is a simple file system deployment.
The last time it worked as expected was 2019-01-30. On the daily build of the 31st, the 'pkg' folder of "FolderProfile" was no longer created. Checking the build server, nothing we could track was changed... no updates, no nothing!
I've run out of ideas or items to check that could explain this failure... can anyone help?
PS:
-MSBuild version is 14.0
-Project being built
-Works on local machine as expected

I figured it out: Apparently, on my local machine, I added a reference to a package that was not available in our internal NUGET (only available on the public NUGET), which is the only source the builder machine has access... that caused an error, but was not reported as such, it failed silently... after copying the nuget pack to out server, it worked again perfectly

Related

Why is Access to the path '/bin/roslyn' denied?

Long story short, I was able to build a bitbucket .NET/MVC/Angular project successfully on windows 2019 azure hosted agent, but I am unable to make it build successfully on ubuntu agent.
The reason I want to build it on ubuntu is because I noticed the build time is way faster than that of the windows agent, which makes sense considering the platforms.
I am facing this error:
Copying file from "/home/vsts/work/1/s/Bobby.ProjectA/obj/Debug/Bobby.ProjectA.pdb" to "/home/vsts/work/1/s/Bobby.ProjectA/bin/Bobby.ProjectA.pdb".
CopyRoslynCompilerFilesToOutputDirectory:
Creating directory "/bin/roslyn".
Creating directory "/bin/roslyn".
Creating directory "/bin/roslyn".
Creating directory "/bin/roslyn".
/home/vsts/work/1/s/packages/Microsoft.CodeDom.Providers.DotNetCompilerPlatform.1.0.8/build/net45/Microsoft.CodeDom.Providers.DotNetCompilerPlatform.props(17,5):
warning MSB3021: Unable to copy file "/home/vsts/work/1/s/packages/Microsoft.Net.Compilers.2.4.0/build/../tools/csc.exe" to "/bin/roslyn/csc.exe". Access to the path '/bin/roslyn' is denied. [/home/vsts/work/1/s/Bobby.ProjectA/Bobby.ProjectA.csproj]
According to this post, the issue is because the VBCSCompiler is locking the src.
So i have exhausted all of these solutions here to kill the VBCCompiler, but none of them worked.
I also can't restart the ubuntu agent during a build due to CI limitation, and killall VBCSCompiler bash script before msbuild task resulted in this error: VBCSCompiler: no process found
So now i am stumped, if VBCSCompiler process is not even running, why is Access to the path '/bin/roslyn' denied???
Ive also tried updating/installing Microsoft.CodeDom.Providers.DotNetCompilerPlatform package per this post here, but that didnt do/help anything.
This is how my build tasks looks like if it helps:

Assets file project.assets.json not found when running a build on Azure Devops

I have a build pipeline configured for a Service Fabric solution on Azure DevOps like this:
Everything was fine until a few days ago when the build started failing on a particular build agent (private), with the following error (for a few projects):
C:\Program Files\dotnet\sdk\2.1.200\Sdks\Microsoft.NET.Sdk\build\Microsoft.PackageDependencyResolution.targets(327,5): Error : Assets file 'F:\Agent03\w\84\s\src\MyProject.Sam.Tiles.Domain\obj\project.assets.json' not found. Run a NuGet package restore to generate this file.
The failing task is the Build solution $(PathToSolution) one.
The weird thing is that the build fails when running on some agents but with others the build is fine.
Some details:
Use NuGet 4.x task started using NuGet v4.9.1 very recently, I think. I tried using v4.8.1 with no luck;
Most of the projects use the PackageReference format, but the .sfproj project uses the packages.config file
I tried using the dotnet restore task but there is an error when trying to restore the packages for the .sfproj project:
`Error : Unable to find the
'....\packages\Microsoft.VisualStudio.Azure.Fabric.MSBuild.1.6.7\build\Microsoft.VisualStudio.Azure.Fabric.Application.props'
file. Please restore the
'Microsoft.VisualStudio.Azure.Fabric.MSBuild' Nuget package
Any idea on what might be causing this issue?
Some of the projects use the PackageReference format but the .sfproj project uses the packages.config file.
I still don't understand why the build started failing, but I was able to find a workaround. Given that PackageReference is not yet supported in Service Fabric projects, my workaround was to use both restore tasks as follows:
My problem turned out to be a solution that didn't include all the necessary projects.
I have a master solution file that includes all my projects, and a number of smaller solution files with only some of the projects. The master solution built fine in Azure DevOps, but the partial solution failed.
I realized that the missing project.assets.json file belonged to a project that needed to be included in this failing solution.
Trevor's comment on 2/20 gave me the clue. You likely don't have the complete set of projects referenced by the solution. (ProjectReferences may go to other projects, which are not in the solution).
Here is why this crazy workaround (run dotnet.exe and nuget.exe restore tasks) worked:
dotnet restore will walk project references by default to ensure they are restored also.
--no-dependencies switch can turn that off.
nuget.exe restore has the opposite default, because we didn't want to break old users.
-recursive can turn this on.
The right solution is to make your solution contain all the projects.
-Rob Relyea
NuGet Client Team, Engineering Manager

What are the steps to package and release VS Code?

I am trying to figure out how to package an unchanged fork of VS Code.
My first steps were to follow the electron application distubution documentation, which has not been successful. I also found this post, where another user had the same question. However, the vscode-win32 gulp task seems to have been replaced by x64 and ia32 versions, and when I try running these tasks they generate an out-vscode folder as opposed to a full electron project.
This led me to believe that I can use this new out folder (as well as node modules, packages.json, etc.) with the electron release being used by VS Code to mimic the resources/app folder from the installed version of VS Code in Program Files, however when I try running electron.exe using this method I get:
The factory method of "vs/code/electron-main/main" has thrown an exception TypeError: Path must be a string. Received undefined
In short, I have been struggling with this for a couple of days, and I am out of ideas. If anyone has packaged the project and can offer a suggestion for how to do so, I would really appreciate it.
SOLVED
The issue seemed to be due to being branched off of master as opposed to release. I'd assume there are changes in main that aren't accounted for in the gulp task.
For anyone confused by my post, the expected behavior for a successful build is for a folder named VSCode-win32-x64 to be generated in the directory where your vscode clone is located.

NuGet error in TeamCity: The process cannot access the file because it is being used by another process

We're using TeamCity (9.0) as our CI server to build, test and deploy several applications. Recently we are seeing occassional (one in every 30/40 builds or so) NuGet (2.8.3) errors as follows:
[restore] The process cannot access the file 'C:\BuildAgent\work\e32cbd0940f38bf.....\packages\Newtonsoft.Json.5.0.6\Newtonsoft.Json.5.0.6.nupkg' because it is being used by another process.
where the actual package seems to differ from time to time.
We suspected it has something to do with the same package being referenced in multiple projects within the same solution, but I would expect NuGet to be able to handle this correctly by filtering out duplicates instead of attempting to retrieve the same package multiple times, thereby ending up with write-locks when restoring the packages to the work folder.
As a first step of each Build Configuration we have a 'NuGet Installer' step set to 'restore'. I've tried fiddling with its settings (different 'Update modes', '-NoCache', older NuGet version (2.8.0)), but to no avail.
Has anyone else experienced similar issues, and if so, has any suggestions on how to ensure this error does not occur.
Any help would be greatly appreciated!
I had the same issue with Jenkins and fixed that by adding "-DisableParallelProcessing" to the nuget restore command, the final command would look like:
nuget restore "%WORKSPACE%\Solutions\App\App.sln" -DisableParallelProcessing
Excluding NuGet package files from our anti-malware products resolved this issue for us.
I used the SysInternals Process Explorer utility on the build agents to search for file handles for any *.nupkg files while the builds were running. After several builds I observed the anti-malware products briefly locking these files during the NuGet restore operations. Adding an exclusion to the anti-malware scanning rules prevented these locks as the files were no longer being scanned.
In our environment we use two different anti-malware products on different build agent servers. We encountered this issue with both products.
As far as the error message is concerned, I also came across it.
I debugged the “nuget restore” process, breaking at the point where the .nupkg is copied to the local repository, and then freezing the thread while the file was opened for writing. And sure enough I got the exception in another task, due to the fact that the two packages had Ids where one was a prefix of the other. I filed an issue for this : https://nuget.codeplex.com/workitem/4465.
However, this is probably not exactly your problem, since the error in my case is on reading the .nupkg of the package with the “long” name, and I don’t think there is a package with an Id that is a prefix of NewtonSoft.Json (whereas it is very possible the other way around : there are for instance NewtonSoft.JsonResult of NewtonSoft.Json.Glimpse).
I installed new Newtonsoft.Json and problem disappear
You can turn on build feature Swabra with option "Locking processes" (requires handle.exe). And check are there any files locked after build's finish or not.
If there are no locked files then try to run Nuget using command line build step instead of NuGet Installer. If the issue is reproduced then most probably it means that the issue is related NuGet.

TLBIMP.EXE - Error TI0000 - *.dll is not a valid type library

While building our project on the Build Server, the compilation fails with the error message:
TlbImp: error TI0000 : The input file 'C:\*.dll' is not a valid type library.
We tried to manually invoke the TlbImp command thru the VS2005 Command Prompt and the same error message appeared.
To investigate, we tried to create a clean build environment in a Virtual Machine (Vbox), then we run the build there. It went fine.
We also tried to invoke the same TlbImp command thru the VS2005 Command Prompt and it succeeded.
With that, we are assuming that there is nothing wrong with the DLL. Do you have any idea what scenario(s) can cause this problem?
EDIT:
Found the problem, see my answer. ;)
If it is working on one machine and not on the other, then most probably some dependency of this DLL is missing in your machine. Inspect the dll through DependencyWalker and you will get to know that which dependency hasn't been built properly.
After closer inspection, we found out that the environment variables on the official build server is FUBAR.
The official build server was installed with both VS2003 and VS2005. Our project is VS2005. The build script is using components from VS2003 instead of VS2005 because the VS2003 paths (Path, LIB, LIBPATH and INCLUDE) were first declared before the VS2005 paths.
A simple SET command to override the environment variables with the "correct ones" fixed the build!
Thanks!