Srctool.exe returns -1 error code in TFS

Question

We just installed TFS 11 for the first time. Starting a private check, it successfully completes, but returns this message:

'srctool.exe' returned an unexpected exit code: '-1'. Error opening the file "CustomDllName.dll": the assembly "CustomDllName.dll" is not a valid .NET assembly and will be skipped for analysis.

Well, right: this file is an outdated Visual Basic 6 DLL, which we do not have much control over. He included COM access to some methods in the project.

Is there a way to instruct srctool.exe / TFS to skip this file during the scan? Or another way to attack this?

Answer 1

Here is the solution that ultimately worked for me

A member of the TFS 11 team from Microsoft told me that the problem was related to a change in behavior that the Windows 8 team did with the srctool.exe tool.

By copying this file from the Windows 7 SDK (WinDBG) and overriding the one included in the TFS 11 beta, I was able to successfully complete the build without any errors.

Answer 2

Is this srctool.exe error from IndexSources activity posted? srctool.exe in this exercise does one thing, which is listing the source file information in pdb. I am not an srctool expert, so I don’t know why in this case it fails. I know that srctool.exe has some behavioral changes in version 11, most of which are fixes from a previous version.

There is a workaround that requires the removal of the assembly template. This is not very nice, but it works. The Srctool.exe script is run (inside the IndexSources operation) for each pdb file in the SymbolFiles collection. Now that you know what pdb is failing, you can update the assembly template to add R emoveFromCollection activity to the IndexSources operation, which removes the problematic pdb from the SymbolFiles Collection. This is by far the easiest workaround I can think of.

Alternatively, you can edit the FindMatchingFiles activity search template to exclude pdb files that you do not want to index sources.

Based on the error message received, it doesn't seem to be related to the known issue that Ed mentioned. We fixed this problem for the next release, so if it is related, it should be fixed :-)

Let me know if you have problems with VS11 Beta around build templates.

Thanks.