.net - There is an invalid character ...

[fkish]

Hi,

I have a C# solution I'm building and it looks like the post build event is giving me the error "There is an invalid character in the given encoding." (in the csproj). This post build bat is required for the rest of the sln to compile. And the "error" will be in each of the csproj's.

VS.Net works fine with this and the postbuild bat is ok. I believe another user mentioned (along time ago when I searched on the above) that the csproj is not truly XML...that is looks like XML but VS is ok with errors that causes other XML parsing programs to call errors.

Does any one know how to prevent the above?

Thanks,
Frank

[kevina]

It sounds like you don't get this error when building with the VS.Net IDE, but you do with Visual Build Professional? Have you invoked the command-line used by Visual Build Pro to determine whether it really is Visual Build Pro or the command-line compiler? To do so, just check the box "Display the compiler command-line that is used", then execute the displayed command-line call manually (noting the output).

If the error occurs when using the command-line compiler, the issue is related to the Microsoft compiler, otherwise please either post or send the following info to support@kinook.com so we can trouble-shoot:
- bld file
- csproj file that causes the problem
- portion of the log indicating the error

[kevina]

And now for the rest of the story (so the thread isn't left hanging):

The situation that was experienced here was that a symbol had been entered in the postbuild line of the .csproj file in the IDE, which made the resulting xml invalid, and the xml parser in Visual Build Professional was detecting this invalid xml and treating it as an error.

In this case the invalid character was a non-standard "-" symbol, which could safely (and appropriately) be replaced with a standard - character and all was well.