'Publish failed' but build succeeded?

Curt picture Curt · Nov 14, 2011 · Viewed 69.7k times · Source

When using Visual Studio 2008, when I "Publish Web Site", the application builds correctly, but then I get a "Publish failed" message:

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What possible reasons are there for this, and how can I prevent it?

Answer

SimonGoldstone picture SimonGoldstone · Feb 2, 2018

I had the same issue. Nightmare to identify the problem, because the logs and outputs show no errors or failures. I simply get "Build: 39 succeeded" and "Publish: 1 failed".

I resolved the problem by systematically removing all NuGet packages one at a time (and removing code that references it) until I identified the offending one.

This takes a LONG time!

However, the answer for me was Microsoft.Net.Compilers.

No idea how I ended up with that in my project, but as soon as I removed that package, everything publishes fine again.

Edit - For what it's worth, this problem occurs on VS 2008, 2012 and 2015 but does not occur on 2017.