Greetings,
After automatically upgrading the project file for a .Net 4.0 web application to work with Visual Studio 2012 everything worked ok at first however when compiling I got lots of errors like this:
And when trying to build using MSBuild (passing just the project full path, with no additional parameters) in the "Developer Command Prompt for VS2012" we got basically the same errors:
Basically: "CSC : error CS2001: Source File 'x' could not be found"
All errors refer to Linked Files (aspx,cs,etc) located in other web applications projects located at a different deep in our code Branch (that's why all the '..\..\' at the beginning of the paths)
To me it looks like a problem with the file Length, I had the same problem a while ago when building the projects on our CI server using MSBuild, I was able to manage it by manipulating the project files before building them using a custom script without the need to move the branch around or reduce the deep of the projects, I didn't have to move anything, the important thing at the time it was that developers using Visual Studio 2010 could compile everything without problems. I learned by this that compiling/Building with MSBuild was different that with DevEnv/VS, and for example MSBuild didn't support building Setup projects and DevEnv did.
Since this is happening now with VS 2012/DevEnv 2012 , plus that VS 2012 doesn't support setup projects anymore (like msbuild), plus VS/DevEnv have the same problem with the file length, it looks like VS 2012 its finally using msbuild under the hood or are more tightly integrated, however I didn't find any article to confirm this.
Changing the branch structure/changing the deep of the projects its not an option right now due to several reasons (large code base, high number of projects, risk , timing, effort, etc).
Does someone have an alternative solution or a fix for this issue in Visual Studio 2012?
Regards,
JPC