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March 3, 2015

Solving Junk Output During Project Build in Visual Studio 2013

Symptoms


I had this weird situation a while ago. A developer can build a project successfully and show the normal details (couple of lines) in output window. However, when I access the same machine, the same Visual Studio instance, and builds the same project then the project builds okay, but output window will display a lot of weird &  junk details, contains inconsistencies with .NET assemblies. This behavior will occur for all projects, even for empty projects coming from VS templates before any custom code added..

I tried the following actions but did not fix it:
  • Clean the build &rebuild
  • Close project & re-open
  • Restarting Visual Studio
  • log-out from machine then log back in


Cause
It appeared that something went wrong with my profile cache within Visual Studio.


Solution
The solution I found is to delete the Visual Studio cache. Not a perfect solution but it works!

Important: Please understand that deleting the cache will make you lose all of your personal settings in VS. You can export the settings first so you can have a backup before you proceed.

Steps
1. Delete the contents from the following folders:
  • C:\Users\<<Your Alias>>\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Team Foundation\5.0\Cache
  • C:\Users\<<Your Alias>>\AppData\Local\Microsoft\VisualStudio \12.0\ComponentModelCache
  • C:\Users\<<Your Alias>>\AppData\Local\Microsoft\VSCommon
2. From command prompt run the "devenv /resetuserdata" command:
  • For 64 bit: C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\Common7\IDE
  • For 32 bit: C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\Common7\IDE