Why are steps Skipped

[scott willeke]

All the sudden a visual build project that has been working fine for some time now just skips some steps (some are visual studio.net bulid steps, and others are subroutine steps) during the build with no indication of why the steps were skipped. If I right-click on the visual studio.NET steps and select 'rebuild selected', it says the following in the “build view” window:

Building subroutine step 'Build MyProjectsName'...
Object reference not set to an instance of an object.
Step 'Build MyProjectName' failed

If I go and immediately manually build the same project inside visual studio.net it builds fine. So my questions are:
1: I would prefer the step display a failure, rather than skipping the step. Otherwise I end up missing some assemblies during a build, and there is not an obvious indication of a build failure.
2: Why would the make visual studio .net build step fail with “object reference not set to an instance of object”.

BTW: The other subroutine step that gets skipped (the subroutine actually uses a “Replace in file step”) appears to work fine if I right-click on it and select “rebuild selected step”.

Also, no “conditional build rule” is selected. All steps in my project have the “Always build this step and child steps when checked” option selected.

Thanks in advance for any feedback.

[kinook]

Regarding the skipped steps, are any of the parent steps unchecked? If so, and "Tools | Application Options | General | Implement nesting of 'Include in Build' step flag" is checked (the default), any child steps of an unchecked parent step will be skipped. Either ensure all parent steps are checked or change this option. If not, send/post a project the reproduces the issue you are seeing.

On the 'object reference' error, I assume you're building a Make VS.NET action? That error usually means that the action encountered something unexpected while parsing one of the project files. Send/post the .SLN + consitituent project files in question, along with the .BLD file that builds them and we can take a look.

[scott willeke]

Indeed, as silly as it sounds, I think my skipped steps were as you suggested, the parent was unchecked; silly me.

I have attached the .csproj file that is giving the "Object reference not set to an instance of an object." error (web.zip). I attached a portion of the bld file that we use to build that is related to the project that is failing (its in the zip). I can send you the whole thing later, but I'm not real comfortable posting the whole thing on a public forum. I'm just not sure how my employer might feel about that. Sorry, I hope its not a problem, let me know if it is and we'll find a way so I can give it to you directly.

[kinook]

I can't reproduce the problem here (it successfully gets to the point of invoking the devenv compiler). Which version of VisBuildPro are you running? Can you send a build log showing the step's error info to support@kinook.com, along with a copy of the info from Help | About | Install Info? Thanks.

[scott willeke]

I deleted all my source and did a full checkout last night and a rebuild, and everything built okay now. Not sure what my problem was there.
Thank you for your thorough help though.

-scott