How to find out which projects failed to be created in Visual Studio

Question

I have a solution in Visual Studio. It contains about 500 projects. When I create a solution, I get a lot of output in the output window, as well as the build log. Suppose in the end I see

Rebuid All: 250 successful, 10 failed, 240 skipped.

If I want to know which projects could not be created, I usually look for 1 error (s) in the output window, then 2 errors (s) , etc., then 9 errors (s) . If I did not find 10 projects that could not use this search, I believe that the number of errors was a multiple of 10. Therefore, I am looking for an error of 10 , 20 (s) , etc. I usually find all failed projects this way, because it is unlikely that there were several errors in the project, which are a multiple of 100.

Question 1: Am I an idiot? What I do seems really idiotic to me - there has to be a better way. What is it?

But sometimes a project can fail for a number of other reasons (I suppose), because today I could not find projects that could not be built, - said 10 failed, but there were only 3 projects with x errors with non-zero x . I assume that there were some projects for which some steps after assembly were not completed or something else

Question 2: How can I find which projects failed in this case?

I am using Visual Studio 2008 SP1

Many thanks for your help.

Answer 1

Why don't you go to the Errors view and just look in the Projects column? Sort it, and then scroll down, indicating when the value changes.

Aside, having 500 projects in solution seems like a very bad idea to me. I strongly suspect that it would be worthwhile either to consolidate the projects, or split into several solutions.

Answer 2

Another solution is to create your solution with MSBuild scripts instead of VS IDEs. No need to write a script yourself. A visual tool such as MSBuild Sidekick can help you create build scripts. You can configure your script construct to interrupt the process with the first build failure and register the project name somewhere for you.

Answer 3

In this case, I prefer to use the "Presentation of Output" in Visual Studio (show output from Build). The reason for this is because you see which solution was the first that could not be built . A project that could not be built there probably contains a code error.

At work, I may have 20 projects that could not be built, and 20,000 errors, all due to one line of code. This is much easier than hunting for every project.