TFS Incremental build error - Unable to perform the get operation because the file already exists locally

tfs msbuild incremental-build
Mark13426 picture Mark13426 · Mar 14, 2015 · Viewed 8.1k times · Source

I'm trying to enable incremental build of my VS solution. In the GUI for xaml build process template, I set "Clean Workspace" to "None" and added /p:IncrementalBuild=True as an MSBuild argument. I then checked in changes to a file, but when I run my TFS build, I immediately get the following error:

Unable to perform the get operation because the file already exists locally

Exception Message: One or more errors occurred while performing a Get operation. (type GetException)
Exception Stack Trace:    at Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Build.Workflow.Activities.SyncWorkspaceInternal.ThrowIfErrorsOccurred.Execute(CodeActivityContext context)
   at System.Activities.CodeActivity.InternalExecute(ActivityInstance instance, ActivityExecutor executor, BookmarkManager bookmarkManager)
   at System.Activities.Runtime.ActivityExecutor.ExecuteActivityWorkItem.ExecuteBody(ActivityExecutor executor, BookmarkManager bookmarkManager, Location resultLocation)

I believe TFS gets my file but cannot overwrite the existing file on the build agent and errors out. How can I force it to overwrite the file?

Answer

Buck Hodges picture Buck Hodges · Mar 15, 2015

The file is writable. When there's a writable file, get will not overwrite it unless the /overwrite option is used. However, you would need to figure out how the file is becoming writable. You may want to go back to the default option of creating a new workspace, running a build with verbose logs, and see what is making the file writable.

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