Visual Studio 2019 Installer Project WARNING: Unable to update the dependencies of the project

Question

I 'm trying to build a Setup/install project in Visual Studio and my main project uses an obfusiciated third party dll that when compiling the setup project it gets this warning:

WARNING: Unable to update the dependencies of the project. The dependencies for the object: 'xxxx.dll' cannot be determined.

But no exe or msi is generated.

How does one resolve this warning/error?

Answer 1

The project file becomes out of whack and this issue has been endemic to Visual Studio since VS2005.

The best advice I found was to close visual studio and edit the project file. Once there empty the sections of "Hierarchy" and "File" where they look like this:

"Hierarchy"
{
}
...
"File" 
{
}

Once done reload the project and re-add outputs.