Visual studio 2005: skip builds for an unknown reason?

Question

I have a visual studio solution with a number of projects. The configuration manager is carefully configured to create all but one of the projects (missed test project). After creating the solution on the command line, I got the following:

"XXX Debug Building | x64"

------ Missed Builds: Project: AAA ------

------ Missed assembly: Project: BBB, Configuration: Win32 debugging ------

No project selected for assembly for this solution configuration

------ Build launched: Project: CCC, Configuration: YYY Debug ia64 ------

<assembly here>

As you can see, the BBB project is skipped because it is not selected in the configuration manager, the CCC project and rest build ok, and the AAA project is skipped with NO REASON GIVEN. Does anyone know why a visual studio can skip building a project for no reason? All configuration names (XXX, YYY Debug, Debug) and platforms (x64 / Win32 / ia64) are correctly configured in the configuration manager.

Answer 1

Is AAA project selected for Debug configuration | x64?

I also had the same situation when a recently downloaded solution (without a .soa file) had the default configuration for Itanium, so the whole system without all its support skipped all the build solutions projects. Correct assembly began only after manually selecting win32.

Answer 2

Run the project from the command line using MSBUILD.exe and set the option for logging (verbosity) = verbose or diagnostic. Then you should get more information telling you why msbuild thought it was skipping the one in question. eg.

msbuild XXXX.csproj / verbosity: verbose

Nb. The diagnostic conclusion is very verbose

Answer 3

Regular assemblies within Visual Studio are incremental: Visual Studio will skip the creation of the project if it believes that none of the source files has been modified - note that it only checks code files and not resources or other “things”.

Try a clean build by selecting Build|Clean Solution , then Build|Rebuild Solution and see if you get the same results.

You may need to manually clear build artifacts for each project (by default, the \Bin\ and \Obj\ subdirectories in each project directory).