Skip to main content

VSTS Team Build Failure when using click-once

As I arrived at work today, I found a build FAILED report in my inbox. Not the best way to start a working day...
Looking at the build report I saw following error:
c:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v3.5\Microsoft.Common.targets(1805,7): error MSB4018: The "ResolveKeySource" task failed unexpectedly.
System.InvalidOperationException: Showing a modal dialog box or form when the application is not running in UserInteractive mode is not a valid operation. Specify the ServiceNotification or DefaultDesktopOnly style to display a notification from a service application.
at System.Windows.Forms.Form.ShowDialog(IWin32Window owner)
at System.Windows.Forms.Form.ShowDialog()
at Microsoft.Build.Tasks.ResolveKeySource.ResolveManifestKey()
at Microsoft.Build.Tasks.ResolveKeySource.Execute()
at Microsoft.Build.BuildEngine.TaskEngine.ExecuteInstantiatedTask(EngineProxy engineProxy, ItemBucket bucket, TaskExecutionMode howToExecuteTask, ITask task, Boolean& taskResult)
After some digging into the issue, I found out that the failure was caused by a certificate we were using to sign our click-once assemblies. This certificate is protected by a key. The first time you trigger a build, you'll be prompted with the question to provide the key. Because Team Build is triggered in a non-UI fashion, an error happens when MSBuild tries to popup a window.
The easiest way to solve this is:
- Logon to the build machine using the build service account
- Run msbuild on any project that uses this signing key. It will prompt for the password and will export the key.
- Now start the TeamBuild full build.
That's all!
Labels:

Popular posts from this blog

Podman– Command execution failed with exit code 125

After updating WSL on one of the developer machines, Podman failed to work. When we took a look through Podman Desktop, we noticed that Podman had stopped running and returned the following error message: Error: Command execution failed with exit code 125 Here are the steps we tried to fix the issue: We started by running podman info to get some extra details on what could be wrong: >podman info OS: windows/amd64 provider: wsl version: 5.3.1 Cannot connect to Podman. Please verify your connection to the Linux system using `podman system connection list`, or try `podman machine init` and `podman machine start` to manage a new Linux VM Error: unable to connect to Podman socket: failed to connect: dial tcp 127.0.0.1:2655: connectex: No connection could be made because the target machine actively refused it. That makes sense as the podman VM was not running. Let’s check the VM: >podman machine list NAME         ...
Read more

Azure DevOps/ GitHub emoji

I’m really bad at remembering emoji’s. So here is cheat sheet with all emoji’s that can be used in tools that support the github emoji markdown markup: All credits go to rcaviers who created this list.
Read more

VS Code Planning mode

After the introduction of Plan mode in Visual Studio , it now also found its way into VS Code. Planning mode, or as I like to call it 'Hannibal mode', extends GitHub Copilot's Agent Mode capabilities to handle larger, multi-step coding tasks with a structured approach. Instead of jumping straight into code generation, Planning mode creates a detailed execution plan. If you want more details, have a look at my previous post . Putting plan mode into action VS Code takes a different approach compared to Visual Studio when using plan mode. Instead of a configuration setting that you can activate but have limited control over, planning is available as a separate chat mode/agent: I like this approach better than how Visual Studio does it as you have explicit control when plan mode is activated. Instead of immediately diving into execution, the plan agent creates a plan and asks some follow up questions: You can further edit the plan by clicking on ‘Open in Editor’: ...
Read more