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MS-Windows Troubleshooting

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Visual Studio 2005: Build failed, 0 Errors

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Symptom:

When compiling a VB.NET application using Visual Studio 2005, the build failed "Build failed" with with 0 errors show.

Possible Causes and Remedy

This seems to be a bug in Visual Studio 2005. Typically this indicates that there is an error on a page but the page isn't currently open and the errors are not listed. Occasionally there are genuinely 0 errors and the "Build Failed" message is wrong.

Things to try:

• Look on the "Output" tab, the cause of the error is often listed there.
• If the project relies upon any libraries that are also Visual Studio projects then try cleaning those and then doing a rebuild.
• Close down Visual Studio, then reopen Visual Studio and reopen the project. Build the project again.
• Open each Web User Control in the project and view the source code for a few seconds. This will give the environment time to flag up errors in the code that it has been negligent in reporting on.
• If the project relies upon any libraries that are also visual studio projects then try cleaning the solution (right click the solution and select "clean solution") and then rebuild each library individually one at a time, ending with the project that is giving (but not showing) build errors.

When one of the above has been successful you will either see one or more errors listed (most likely), or the project will show as "as "Build Succeeded" (occasionally).

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These notes have been tested within Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2005 (with SP1) for .NET 2 running under Windows XP Professional and may apply to other versions as well.