Wacky compile behavior

June 17, 2007 11:31 AM

Why does my Visual Studio 2005 project compile, and then immediately NOT compile?

I'm in the process of converting a web application from Visual Studio 2003 (ASP.NET 1.1) to Visual Studio 2005 (ASP.NET 2.0). Sometimes, when I compile the project, I get no compilation errors. Then, if I compile again IMMEDIATELY, without changing ANYTHING, I get a bunch of new compile errors (not warnings, mind you, but bona-fide errors). What's going on?

posted by sherlockt to technology (5 comments total)

In all seriousness has anyone else experienced this (frequently recurring) problem with Visual Studio 2005?
posted by sherlockt at 12:17 PM on June 17, 2007

I haven't had this, but have had similar things happen with GCC on linux. The cause was bad RAM.
posted by rbs at 12:36 PM on June 17, 2007

Are the errors always the same or do they appear random? If they are random bad memory is probably the cause, just as rbs said.

If they are always the same, what are the errors?

If the compiler can't write to the target files you will get errors, but this usually only happens if you e.g. are running the project at the same time you are trying to compile it. It shouldn't happen if you're just doing two compiles immediately after each other though...
posted by rpn at 12:44 PM on June 17, 2007

Do you have more than one project in the solution?

I've had similar things happen when one project uses the output of another project, but I didn't have the project dependencies set up right.
posted by Diz at 12:53 PM on June 17, 2007

I do have more than one project in the solution, but the compilation errors always center around the one project. I'm also using a set of third-party controls in that project, and the errors mostly have to do with that set of controls, so that may be introducing some weirdness.
posted by sherlockt at 12:55 PM on June 17, 2007