How to find reason of failed Build without any error or warning

Question

Build + Intellisense swallowed the error messages. Selecting Build Only displayed them.

I just ran into a similar situation. In my case, a custom action (from the MSBuildVersioning package available on Nuget.org - http://www.nuget.org/packages/MSBuildVersioning/) which appeared in the csproj file's BeforeBuild target was failing without triggering any error message in the normal place.

I was able to determine this by setting the "MSBuild project build output verbosity" (in the latest Visual Studio's Tools tab [Path: Tools > Options > Build and Run]) to "Diagnostic" as shown below. This then showed that the custom action (in my case HgVersionFile) was what had failed.

• If solution contains more than one project, try building them one at a time.
• Try restart Visual Studio.
• Try restart Computer.
• Try "Rebuild all"
• Try "Clean Solution" then remove your "vspscc" files and "vssscc" files and then restart Visual Studio and then "Rebuild All".

VS (2013 Pro, Win 8.1) restart did it for me.

Delete .vs folder & restart VS, worked for me

I want to expand on Sasse's answer.

To fix the problem with Visual Studio 2015 Update 2 I had to build each project one at a time and look at the output window after each build.

One project gave me

"The type or namespace name 'SomeNamespace' does not exist in the namespace 'BeforeSomeNamespace' (are you missing an assembly reference?)".

There was no error in the Error List window but the assembly had a yellow warning sign under "References".

I then saw that the referencing project targeted 4.5.1 and the referenced project 4.6.1. Changing 4.6.1 to 4.5.1 allowed the overall build to succeed.