TeamCity Build Errors

A .NET site I work on uses TeamCity to deploy changes to both staging and live servers. I was encountering build errors related to the .csproj file on the staging server and couldn't figure out what the issue was. Looking at the build log, I noticed a bunch of errors saying "the type or namespace could not be found." However when I checked the files on the staging server, everything seemed to be there.

I was also googling about TeamCity and how it works (I inherited this project and am not super familiar with TC). I discovered that when TC builds, it actually copies all the files on the server into a separate TC work directory, builds that, then if it is successful it copies the changed files back into the actual server files. This means that the failed build was happening in the work directory, not the actual website.

The next day I went back to the problem with a fresh mindset. One thing I've started doing is the "talk to the duck" strategy for troubleshooting. This technique has you talk out loud to a rubber duck, or some other inanimate object, explaining what your issue is. This has actually helped me a ton when I'm stuck on some especially difficult problem. I don't talk out loud to an object, but what I have been doing is writing out the problem on a whiteboard. It works well because it takes you out of the tunnel vision when you're bug fixing and forces you to step back and look at the problem on a more high level.

Anyway, when I wrote out the problem, it was issues with the csproj file, and assembly errors. Knowing now that TC was erroring out in the work directory, I checked the bin folder and realized that it was almost completely empty. So I manually copied and pasted the bin files from the website directory to the TC directory and tried again. There were a couple other missing files which I also copied over. Finally I hit build one last time and it was successful!

The green message box has never looked so good.

I  haven't done this yet, but I think the /bin and other missing files need to be added to the csproj. My guess is that the bin files were copied and pasted manually previously. But at some point TC probably ran a cleanup and deleted everything to build from scratch, meaning with an incomplete project file, thus causing all the build errors.

In summary, for TeamCity build errors, check the following:

• See where the errors are happening in the log file
• Check that the /bin files exist in the TC work directory
• Copy/paste any missing files to the work directory and add to the csproj