Visual Studio 2008 Setup Project Build Fails
As many of you may know, setup projects fail on build with no errors in certain solutions. This happens to be a strange LINQ to SQL issue. If one project uses it any setup projects in that same solution will fail on build with no errors. There is a workaround. However this work around is no good for web site projects. The work around is to edit the project file manually. A website project does not have it and the closest thing to it would be the web.config file.
For regular projects do this to workaround the issue:
1. Close VS 2008.
2. Open the project file containing the LINQ To SQL item in Notepad.
3. Remove the following lines:
<ItemGroup>
<Service Include=”{3259AA49-8AA1-44D3-9025-A0B520596A8C}” />
</ItemGroup>
If you open the DBML designer again you will have to perform this work around again. For solutions with a web site project using LINQ to SQL all you can do is temporarily remove the web site project from the solution, build the setup project and place it back in afterwards.
Luckily even though it says it fails nothing actually fails and the installer is created. Microsoft’s Connect site lists this project as fixed. However it has been stated that with the Visual Studio 2008 SP1 beta the problem still exists. So either there is some hotfix out there that nobody can seem to find or it is going to be a long time until this is actually resolved.
