VSTS Build for Asp.Net Core solution fails with error MSB3554: Cannot write to the output file

Question

We have a Asp.Net Core 1.1 project that we just moved to VSTS and when we created a build definition that fails with

enter code hereC:\Program Files\dotnet\sdk\1.0.0\Microsoft.Common.CurrentVersion.targets(2865,5): error MSB3554: Cannot write to the output file "C:\a\1\s\OurProject\obj\debug\netcoreapp1.1\OurProject.SomeResourceFile.fi-FI.resources". Positive number required. [C:\a\1\s\OurProject\OurProject.csproj]

C:\Program Files\dotnet\sdk\1.0.0\Microsoft.Common.CurrentVersion.targets(2865,5): error MSB3554: Parameter name: bufferSize [C:\a\1\s\OurProject\OurProject.csproj]

I builds fine in Visual Studio 2017 on my machine and in the vsts build settings the Agent Queue is VS2017.

Answer 1

I encountered the same issue because the resource file was empty, which caused the .NET Core CLI to throw the error. The issue is here: microsoft/msbuild#1661.

The workaround is to manually edit your *.resx file and add some data to the file. Here is that snippet from @sharwell's PR in Roslyn:

<data name="EmptyResource" xml:space="preserve">
    <value>Remove this value when another is added.</value>
    <comment>https://github.com/Microsoft/msbuild/issues/1661</comment>
</data>