My build box became one of the many victims to the mysterious "Unrecoverable build error", when trying to build a solution that tried to compile a visual studio setup project. After following the advice at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/329214/EN-US/, didn't work, trying repair on Visual Studio, nope, and finally a full uninstall and install of Visual Studio, nah nah; I was still no better off.
I then realised that I could build the setup projects using visual studio and via the command line but the build account could not. The issue was with the account itself it would seem and not some mysterious code error; other than the unhelpul message. Once I started down this path I noticed that the folder for the account under c:\documents and settings was very big, so much so that when I tried to find out how big my explorer ran at 50% and just didn't stop and started to grow in memory usage (memory leak?). It is then I decided to kill the profile of the account.
Finally after some tweaking I got the build to work by doing the following:
- Stop (and perhaps disable) the Team Build Service.
- Remove the profile for the account of the service from the machine.
- Delete the folder under c:\documents and settings that relates to that account. This was still problamatic with explorer so I ended up moving, renaming it, and deleting files and folder at the command line.
- Remove the workspaces using tf.exe (e.g. tf workspace /delete) from that machine that are owned by that account on that machine.
- Login to the machine using the account and at a cmd prompt try tf workspaces /server:<server> ; initally when I tried to restart the service without doing step 4 and 5 I got other errors, e.g. cannot determine workspace and other errors of similar ilk.
- Restart the Team Build Service and run a new build.
On a much more positive side I noticed that my build time has now reduced from 1 hour 20 min to just under 30 mins; which is strangely what it was a year ago; with all the improvement coming from the part of the build that relies on devenv.exe i.e. BizTalk and Setup Projects. And we all thought the growing build times was due to our increasingly complex code. So it may be that this little clean up needs to be added to my regular clean up schedule.