TextTransform.exe error code 123

Question

What does error code 123 mean in the context of VS2015's version of TextTransform.exe?

It runs fine with the same command in a developer command prompt but fails when in a prebuild script (it was working fine in VS2013).

Unfortunately the error code doesn't give me anything to go on.

"%CommonProgramFiles(x86)%\Microsoft Shared\TextTemplating\14.0\texttransform.exe" -out "C:\[REMOVEDPATH]\Generated\Content.cs" -P "%PROGRAMFILES(x86)%\Reference Assemblies\Microsoft\Framework\.NETFramework\v4.6.1" "C:\[REMOVEDPATH]\Generated\Content.tt"

The only other thing of note is that VS2015 is running as administrator, particularly as the destination path is not writable without admin access.

Answer 1

TextTransform.exe was a complete red herring after my investigations going as far as attempting to do procdumps and looking for microsoft reference source code.

It's only when I copied the path from VS2015's pre-build textarea into NotePad++ that I noticed it was prefixed by U+201C (Left double quotation mark) instead of U+0022 (quotation mark)!!!

Error Code 123 is in fact a system error ERROR_INVALID_NAME but I would never come up with that in the search results when looking for msbuild or texttransform errors.

Very strange how this worked in VS2012 and VS2013 perfectly fine for so many years!