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This time, we’re taking a look at an annoying situation where your previous debugging session, or perhaps your dotnet serve, somehow locks-up your dlls or other important files that you kind of need to overwrite when rebuilding. And that, well, causes your build or debugging session to fail. So, let’s take a closer look at the actual errors we’ve run ourselves into! Problem Build complains about retrying something and failing afterward, and something like this is either in the console or in your build output…Continue reading How to kill the process causing the “MSB3021 Unable to copy file — The process cannot access the file because it is being used by another process.” error?
This is something that comes up pretty often – when you’re building an application, or maybe a library you’re sharing as a NuGet package to your friends: You’ll need to share a dependency or two with your particular package, and you don’t want your end users having to reference those libraries, too. Sounds easy, right? But alas, it’s not as simple as one would like :) (Well, unless you’re happy running dotnet publish every time – that should work, but I want to have these…Continue reading How to copy dependent assemblies to the bin folder on build?
This article describes how to fix and tweak your pre-build directives in Visual Studio – just in case they refuse to work properly. Because yeah, apparently that sometimes just randomly happens. But fear not – there’s a stupid and ugly, but definitely thoughtful workaround available! Also, sorry for the confusing title. I’m taking suggestions for a more descriptive one – but this one was kind of difficult to word clearly. Anyway – on to the topic of the day! Problem So you’re either trying to…Continue reading How to fix a build configuration that’s not available as a build directive in Visual Studio?
I ran into another interesting one when working with a .NET Core 3.0 project and Entity Framework Core – this time, RuntimeIdentifier configuration causing trouble. In short, running Update-Database (to apply code-first migrations to your local database) locally would return this, annoying error: I suspect this can happen with any x86 runtimeIdentifier, but the one I had specified in my .csproj-file was this: This value (or similar) is required for a self-contained ASP.NET Core deployment. And I’m sure there are a few other reasons why…Continue reading EF Core fails to load hostpolicy.dll when RuntimeIdentifier is win-x86
This was another peculiar one – something, that didn’t bring up too many results on Google. Always fun trying to figure out those! So, when configuring an Azure DevOps pipeline (build) for a .NET project, you might run into this annoying error: ##[error]The nuget command failed with exit code(1) and error(Cannot determine the packages folder to restore NuGet packages. Please specify either -PackagesDirectory or -SolutionDirectory. Job: “The nuget command failed with exit code(1) and error(Cannot determine the packages folder to restore NuGet packages. Please specify…Continue reading Azure DevOps build fails with “The nuget command failed with exit code(1) and error(Cannot determine the packages folder to restore NuGet packages.”
There’s now a new version of the assembly Microsoft.IdentityModel.Clients.ActiveDirectory available – plenty of reasons to update right away! Let me offer you one hot take on the matter since the earlier 3.x -versions of the package had some issues. Why bother updating? In an earlier post I described an issue I had with Microsoft.IdentityModel.Clients.ActiveDirectory.Platform not getting copied during the build in a referencing project. In 3.17.0, which the developers published this month, they fixed the issue! The new package actually contains separate DLLs for different platforms. In…Continue reading New version of Microsoft.IdentityModel.Clients.ActiveDirectory (ADAL.NET) is out – good time to update!
Visual Studio failing to copy a referenced assembly to a project in build might lead to surprising runtime errors. This post will explain one method of fixing these issues, using Microsoft.IdentityModel.Clients.ActiveDirectory as the example – as earlier versions of that assembly had this issue! Problem After build, you might get this kind of error: Could not load file or assembly ‘Microsoft.IdentityModel.Clients.ActiveDirectory.Platform, Version=3.13.1.846, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35’ or one of its dependencies. The system cannot find the file specified. System.IO.FileNotFoundException at System.Reflection.RuntimeAssembly._nLoad(AssemblyName fileName, String codeBase, Evidence assemblySecurity, RuntimeAssembly locationHint,…Continue reading A quick (and handy!) hack to force referenced assembly to getting copied to a project
This post describes a few different ways of fixing the “The specified path, file name, or both are too long. The fully qualified file name must be less than 260 characters, and the directory name must be less than 248 characters.” error. One can encounter this issue when trying to package/publish a SharePoint solution, web site, or an Azure Webjob. Symptoms Visual Studio throws the following error when packaging a SharePoint solution to a .wsp file when deploying or publishing your web project (for example…Continue reading Fixing the error: “The specified path, file name, or both are too long. The fully qualified file name must be less than 260 characters, and the directory name must be less than 248 characters.”
