Visual Studio 2015 project builds failed but no er

Question

My project builds all fail but I'm not shown any errors. I tried cleaning and rebuilding, that didn't work.

I changed the MSBuild output verbosity to 'Diagnostic' hoping it would help me identify the problem and now I'm stuck. Here's what the output looks like:

1>Project 'ProjectMM.Data.Models' is not up to date. Input file 'C:\Projects\ProjectMM\ProjectMM.Data.Models\ProjectMM.Data.Models.csproj' is modified after output file 'C:\Projects\ProjectMM\ProjectMM.Data.Models\bin\Debug\ProjectMM.Data.Models.pdb'.
All packages are already installed and there is nothing to restore.
1>------ Build started: Project: ProjectMM.Data.Models, Configuration: Debug Any CPU ------
2>Project 'ProjectMM.Data' is not up to date. Input file 'C:\Projects\ProjectMM\ProjectMM.Data\ProjectMM.Data.csproj' is modified after output file 'C:\Projects\ProjectMM\ProjectMM.Data\bin\Debug\ProjectMM.Data.pdb'.
2>------ Build started: Project: ProjectMM.Data, Configuration: Debug Any CPU ------
3>Project 'ProjectMM' is not up to date. Input file 'c:\projects\projectmm\projectmm\app_start\bundleconfig.cs' is modified after output file 'C:\Projects\ProjectMM\ProjectMM\bin\ProjectMM.pdb'.
3>------ Build started: Project: ProjectMM, Configuration: Debug Any CPU ------
========== Build: 0 succeeded, 3 failed, 0 up-to-date, 0 skipped ==========

Answer 1

I don't know whether I am the only one who is facing this problem. in my case when I opened Visual Studio the timezone was in GMT+1:00 and the build was successful and then I changed the timezone to GMT+5:30 and then without restarting the Visual Studio I tried to run the application but the build failed without any error or warning, then I changed back the timezone to GMT+1:00 and the build succeeded without any error.

Answer 2

Niche issue: I ran into the same issue just now. None of the answers above seemed to help.

Issue was for a Console program, one cannot mark the Main() method as async** which is what I was doing. Not sure, why Visual Studio could not specify why exactly the project was not building (I got 0 errors and 0 warnings every time). I am using Visual Studio 2015 Enterprise.

Fix: The work around for that is here.

Answer 3

This might happen when you reference a different .net framework version project (v4.5.2 vs v4.5 in my case). Correcting this will fix your problem.

Answer 4

This can also happen when migrating a project to Visual Studio 2015 with an older Framework. Check your Warnings in your Error List. You may see something like project is currently .NET version 2.0 and requires .NET 3.5 or higher. If you find a similar warning go to your project's properties and target the required .NET Framework.

Answer 5

When open a solution, generate it, I can see some build errors or warnings reported in the "Output tab", while the "Error tab" does not report any problem.

You can see that the "Error tab" config is OK ("Build only" and "Entire solution" selected).

Note that, after a deep investigation, I identified that this only occurs only if the "Error tab" was not shown yet when you start the build!

If you activated the "Error tab" before doing the build (or if it was the current tab when you launched Visual), then newly found errors/warnings will show up correctly:

It's as if the "Error tab" is initialized only when it gets visible (which may be true as it takes more time to show up first time you click it...), and, if it was not, it does not gather build results...

So far, having no better answer to this problem than "activate the Error tab before building".

And I bet that's why "restarting VS" sometime works. You see the "Error tab" is empty, you close and repoen VS, then, "Error tab" is shown by default as VS restored the current active tab from previous session. You build and now the "Error tab" gets populated...! You just got lucky.

Note: Reported a VS bug: https://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/details/3132689

Answer 6

For me the build failed without errors, but after some light investigation I found out that the refence to MSHTML wasn't found by VS.

The behavior appeared after an update to Windows 10. To fix it you need to register the assembly from the GAC. For how to do it, go to this answer MSHTML DLL on Windows 10 that's where I found my answer.