How to get information about a failed build in Visual Studio Xamarin

Question

After trying to change the names of the EditText in my app, I suddenly can't debug it anymore cause it keeps failing to build and I get this error The file "obj\\Debug\\android\\bin\\packaged_resources" does not exist .

I've looked online and found that deleting the SDK sometimes helps, and others saw it was a completely different issue with files names or strings.

I ran across this StackOverflow thread where the user explains how he arrived at what the issue was using the diagnostic output in VS. I managed to get this far, but as a still learning programmer, the wall of text is overwhelming me and I'm not sure what I'm looking for to resolve my issue.

This is the thread I'm talking about - Visual Studio 2017 - Xamarin - The file "obj\\Debug\\android\\bin\\packaged_resources" does not exist (Look under the solution in the comments)

What should I be looking for in that output? I could probably upload mine and have someone point out the solution, but I'm hoping to learn from this so I can resolve similar issues when I run into them :)

Thanks!

Edit: When I double click on the error, it takes me to Xamarin.Android.Common.target, but doesn't highlight the issue so I'm still totally lost :/

Answer 1

I have logged a bug on this here:

https://bugzilla.xamarin.com/show_bug.cgi?id=55232

The issue is that the AAPT errors are not making it to the Error List in Visual Studio. I would suspect this is a bug immediately as the behavior was not present before this release.

The method to debug issues until this is hotfixed is to turn your MSBuild verbosity to diagnostic in your Visual Studio options. Next rebuild your project and search for apt or the aapt task in which you'll find the errors of your project.

If you want to upload a build output to your original post, I can push you in the right direction.