ClickOnce - Cannot publish because a project failed to build

Question

When I try to publish my (WPF, C#) application, I get these errors:
Cannot publish because a project failed to build.
Could not find file \'obj\\x86\\Debug

Answer 1

I'm not sure exactly how your development machine can get fouled up this way, but this started happening for several developers in our group too.

After researching it, it appears that the built in build/publish script that Visual Studio (2010 in our case) uses has a flaw in the order that it does things. Most importantly it runs a cleanup on the OBJ directory deleting the target EXE file before the publish step can grab it.

The solution
This is somewhat of a hacky workaround, but it solved the problem for me.

The fix is to copy the file back to the /obj/ folder from the /bin/ folder right before the publish step. Unfortunately there is no way that I know to specify a BeforePublish event through the IDE, so you will have to edit the .vbproj file in a text editor.

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