How to find reason of failed Build without any error or warning

Build + Intellisense swallowed the error messages. Selecting Build Only displayed them.

Screenshot


I just ran into a similar situation. In my case, a custom action (from the MSBuildVersioning package available on Nuget.org - http://www.nuget.org/packages/MSBuildVersioning/) which appeared in the csproj file's BeforeBuild target was failing without triggering any error message in the normal place.

I was able to determine this by setting the "MSBuild project build output verbosity" (in the latest Visual Studio's Tools tab [Path: Tools > Options > Build and Run]) to "Diagnostic" as shown below. This then showed that the custom action (in my case HgVersionFile) was what had failed.

Screen capture from Visual Studio showing the modified setting.


  • If solution contains more than one project, try building them one at a time.
  • Try restart Visual Studio.
  • Try restart Computer.
  • Try "Rebuild all"
  • Try "Clean Solution" then remove your "vspscc" files and "vssscc" files and then restart Visual Studio and then "Rebuild All".