“Object reference not set to an instance of an object” when building my cloud project

Question

When I build my solution with a bunch of cloud projects, I see one or more \"Error: Object reference not set to an instance of an object\" messages in the output. When I try

Answer 1

I got the same message while publishing our project too, though in Visual Studio 2010.

For me, deleting all the files from bin folder worked.

Answer 2

I had a similar issue when a publish exited out and I started receiving the 'Object not found' error. VS2013 (in my case) was reporting that 'diagnostics.wadcfg' was missing and had unusually stored this into a different directory.

By going into the project file (.ccproj) and removing the erroneous entry from the 'Project\ItemGroup\Content Include "\diagnostics.wadcfg" and reloading the project - everything kicked back into life.

Failing that, check a working project file against the offending project file for inconsistencies.

Answer 3

I had the same problem. Right click on the cloud service project, unload the project. Reload it again.

Answer 4

I also had this error when building. Projects within the solution would build independently but building the entire solution failed.

I have learnt usually these types of issues are caused by invalid azure role or configuration files. In my case it turns out a .cscfg config file rename on another branch was merged with my branch but it didn't rename the file – therefore the .ccproj file in my branch was incorrectly referring to the new name but only the old filename existing in the solution. After manually editing the .ccproj with the new filename I closed/reopened the solution and things started working.

Answer 5

I had this bug (but not using a cloud project). Turns out the character encoding that Perforce (P4V) was using was wrong, it should have been UTF-8. After changing to UTF-8 and re-syncing the code, Visual Studio was able to find and compile the project just fine.

Answer 6

Maybe a hint: I got the same error message, when compiling VS2013 Dot42 project - realized it was caused by assigning concrete value of some inner type (in my case Enum) to INullable variable:

private SomeClass.SomeEnum? _var1;
...
_var1 = SomeClass.SomeEnum.XY;    // causes compilation error

The solution was, not to use INullable:

private SomeClass.SomeEnum _var1;