Build hang

One of my automated builds started at 10am, and usually only takes about 20 minutes. At 11am I thought I'd see if it passed or not and noticed that it was still running and seemed to be stuck at 'Getting Sources'. The build log file on the build server appeared to have been stopped mid-sentence, like "Getting file $/My Project/My fi". I looked around for a bit and eventually decided that I'd just reboot the server and start the build again.

After I rebooted the build appeared to continue and even started compiling some of the sources, but then stopped again half way through compiling one of the solutions, with the build log once again cut mid sentence. I've just started the build again just in case, and the new instance of the build has just finished running fine. The previous build appears to still have hung and thinks it's still running.

Does anyone know why this might have happened, and how to stop the hung build from running

Well to stop a build see:

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa337616(VS.80).aspx

That worked. Thanks.

Any idea why this might have happened

This has happen to me in the past, what usually causes it for me is calling Visual Studio from the script. If you don't have the params just right VS will show a dialog telling you that you don't have the right commands.

If you are calling VS, or any other exe, from your script here is a suggestion to see if that's the issue:

1) set the timeout attribute in the Exec Node
2) check your log file for the actual executed command
3) log in to the build server
4) Execute the command

5) See if the command causes a dialog to be displayed


I ran into this quite a bit when trying to get my MSI¡¯s built.