Publish Web Site (Precompilation) stalls/hangs in Visual Studio

Question

I'm working on an ASP.NET Web Forms application (.NET 4.0 VS 2010). Lately we've been experiencing problems which have halted our release process.

Specifically, we have found ourselves unable to publish our website (to precompile it). Across all of our developer environments (3 developers), the build process appears to be stalling/hanging - without any report of error. Sometimes, it appears to succeed but only a couple of the compiled DLL's and .compiled files appear (less than 10 out of ~350 files).

I've loaded in various revisions of our projects from our source repository, both latest and very old versions which previously worked. The fact that it's happening across developer environments suggested that the problem was due to some change we committed, but the fact that the problem is occurring across latest and old revisions of the application perhaps suggest otherwise.

Internet searches for this issue reveal nothing significant. Things I've tried include the following:

• Building and rebuilding
• Clean solution
• Deleting the .suo files for the solution
• Deleting the contents of the ASP.NET Temporary Files solution and deleting the target location folder prior to publishing
• Tried selecting the 'Allow this precompiled site to be updateable' option (produces an object reference error without a file or line number)
• Restarting Visual Studio and PC

On examination of CPU usage during the build, the CPU usage for the devenv.exe process is in the sub 0.10% area for most of it (a few spikes at the beginning just).

I appreciate any assistance anyone can provide with this

UPDATE: We have found that eventually, the publish succeeds, but sometimes we get a long series of failures before it succeeds. There's no consistency at all... it seems random.

Answer 1

The issue seems to have been caused by the McAfee virus-scanning software that we have installed.

Only with admin privileges, we were able to temporarily disable the real-time scanning, and as soon as we done that the ASP.NET Publish would complete successfully almost instantly.

For anyone else in this situation, it was McAfee's anti-virus software that was causing the problem. I checked the logs for the anti-virus software and there was no evidence that the software was blocking anything related to the Visual Studio processes or the folders that are manipulated during the build and publish processes (eg The ASP.NET temporary files folder).

Specifically, the csc.exe (C# compiler) and devenv.exe (Visual Studio) processes were having problems with McAfee. These processes were added as 'Low-Risk Processes' to the 'On-Access Scanner' to resolve the problem.

McAffee removes any changes to it's settings every 15 minutes, meaning that the action of adding these processes to the McAfee exception list (low-risk processes) has to be repeated every 15 minutes when you are building your code. This could happen a lot during a working day.

Answer 2

I had this same issue with Visual Studio 2015 on Server 2016. The issue was partially resolved by running VS as administrator. However the apparent root cause was virus scan - in this case ESET- installed not as a File Security but as workstation. This I discovered when every entry of the license codes for ESET appeared to work - then ESET reported it still required verification. Uninstalled the badly chosen ESET and reinstalled the correct license product and, presto, with or without pre-completion, the publish works! Thanks to the previous virus scan tip!

Answer 3

I see you do not have Allow this precompiled site to be updatable checked, so your Publish may be attempting to update what it thinks has changed.

Try deleting all the files (copy existing files to a new location or rename the folder, if you want), and try your Publish again.