VisualStudio 2013 weird compile issues

Question

Issue

I'm having some really odd compile issues using Visual Studio 2013 and it's really disrupting my teams workflow.

The issue is hard to explain but I will provide screen shots and code snippets to help people understand the problems we are facing.

We have a project that we recently moved to VisualStudio 2013 from 2010 and upgraded it to .Net 4.5, the project is a ASP.net Web Forms project.

The code compiles and runs but oddly when I change any of the class files sometimes even just adding a comment 'Test Comment it fails to compile.

The errors shown in the error window are all wierd and the IntelliSense shows errors in the wrong place, some of the errors are even completly off. An example is _To is not defined in the line Dim _Town as String or in the same line 'ring' is not defined which is oviously part of the word String

ScreenShots

Here are some of the errors after I added the failing code at line 44 and then commented it out and re-compiled

What I've tried

I've tried to change the files line endings and make sure they are all Windows CR+LF, I've tried snooping in the build output nothing I can really see to help me. I even brung the solution down from source control on another machine to test and it had the same issue. It didn't actually compile properly at all on the new machine but I don't know yet if these two issues are related.

Answer 1

I had the same issue as yours, and also the same scenario (I had upgraded a very old VB.NET project to a 2013 project).

The issue seem to be related to file encoding. I don't know the exact cause, but it might be having multiple files with different encoding (In my case, some files were ANSI, other files were UTF-8 w/ BOM).

If you aren't sure about having files with different encoding, open them in Notepad++. You should see the file encoding in the bottom-right corner.

At first, I have convert the offending file to ANSI to see if this will resolve the problem. I opened the offending file in Notepad++, selected Encoding-Convert to ANSI, Saved, Encoding->Encode In UTF-8 without BOM, Saved and Reloaded the file in VS. Now the project compile successfully.

However, I didn't want to do this every time I changed the file, (since VS convert it back to UTF8), therefore I copied all the old files (In my case they were 4 files only) to a temporary directory, deleted the files from VS and created new files with the same name, and I copy/pasted the content into each file. Now all my files are in UTF8, and I am no longer having this issue.

The solution is to either convert your files to ANSI as UTF8, or convert them to UTF8 (This seems to be the default encoding for newly created files in Visual Studio, so I suggest converting them to UTF8)

If you have a lot of files I think you can try to convert them to UTF8 using Notepad++.

Regards.