Serendipituos Code

Problem

I was enhancing an application that I have been working with for years, without any trouble.

This application was developed with Visual Studio and the solution has multiple projects.
While I was working on the enhancements I did some refactoring and renamed some of the classes and files on the application. All of the “sudden” I started to get this error message on one of the projects every other time I tried to run or compile the solution.

Severity Code Description Project File Line Suppression State
Error The "GenerateResource" task failed unexpectedly.
System.Runtime.InteropServices.ExternalException (0x80004005): A generic error occurred in GDI+.
at System.Drawing.Image.Save(Stream stream, ImageCodecInfo encoder, EncoderParameters encoderParams)
at System.Drawing.Image.Save(MemoryStream stream)
at System.Drawing.Image.System.Runtime.Serialization.ISerializable.GetObjectData(SerializationInfo si, StreamingContext context)
at System.Runtime.Serialization.Formatters.Binary.WriteObjectInfo.InitSerialize(Object obj, ISurrogateSelector surrogateSelector, StreamingContext context, SerObjectInfoInit serObjectInfoInit, IFormatterConverter converter, ObjectWriter objectWriter, SerializationBinder binder)
at System.Runtime.Serialization.Formatters.Binary.WriteObjectInfo.Serialize(Object obj, ISurrogateSelector surrogateSelector, StreamingContext context, SerObjectInfoInit serObjectInfoInit, IFormatterConverter converter, ObjectWriter objectWriter, SerializationBinder binder)
at System.Runtime.Serialization.Formatters.Binary.ObjectWriter.Serialize(Object graph, Header[] inHeaders, __BinaryWriter serWriter, Boolean fCheck)
at System.Runtime.Serialization.Formatters.Binary.BinaryFormatter.Serialize(Stream serializationStream, Object graph, Header[] headers, Boolean fCheck)
at System.Runtime.Serialization.Formatters.Binary.BinaryFormatter.Serialize(Stream serializationStream, Object graph)
at System.Resources.ResourceWriter.WriteValue(ResourceTypeCode typeCode, Object value, BinaryWriter writer, IFormatter objFormatter)
at System.Resources.ResourceWriter.Generate()
at System.Resources.ResourceWriter.Dispose(Boolean disposing)
at System.Resources.ResourceWriter.Close()
at Microsoft.Build.Tasks.ProcessResourceFiles.WriteResources(ReaderInfo reader, IResourceWriter writer)
at Microsoft.Build.Tasks.ProcessResourceFiles.WriteResources(ReaderInfo reader, String filename)
at Microsoft.Build.Tasks.ProcessResourceFiles.ProcessFile(String inFile, String outFileOrDir)
at Microsoft.Build.Tasks.ProcessResourceFiles.Run(TaskLoggingHelper log, ITaskItem[] assemblyFilesList, List`1 inputs, List`1 satelliteInputs, List`1 outputs, Boolean sourcePath, String language, String namespacename, String resourcesNamespace, String filename, String classname, Boolean publicClass, Boolean extractingResWFiles, String resWOutputDirectory)
at Microsoft.Build.Tasks.GenerateResource.Execute()
at Microsoft.Build.BackEnd.TaskExecutionHost.Microsoft.Build.BackEnd.ITaskExecutionHost.Execute()
at Microsoft.Build.BackEnd.TaskBuilder.d__26.MoveNext() PerformanceReports

Solution

It turns out that few weeks ago I had created a git repository to back up my code, apparently the git repository did not liked my renaming of files and classes and it started to run into serious issues. This is a solution to try:

Step 1 – Remove Source Control

Open your solution
Go to Tools -> Options -> Source Control -> Plug-in Selection and select none
Close Visual Studio

Step 2 – Remove the bin and obj folders from your folders

Team foundation services and Git keep files on your folders. Sometime information is not cleared out and it causes problems when compiling.
So go ahead and delete the folders

Step 3 – Build your solution

Open your solution and build it again. You should be able to run your application