TFS Build SonarQube Error - SonarAnalyzer.dll could not be found

Got a call for help from a colleague who couldn’t get an Acceptance release out of the door. Problem was that the automated build responsible for packaging and deploying the Acceptance version failed. He asked me to take a look…

Inside the build logs we noticed the following error message:

2018-11-13T06:35:22.4133574Z (CoreCompile target) ->

2018-11-13T06:35:22.4133574Z   CSC : error CS0006: Metadata file 'D:\b\4\agent\_work\_temp\.sonarqube\resources\1\Google.Protobuf.dll' could not be found [D:\b\4\agent\_work\40\s\MTIL.Domain\MTIL.Domain.csproj]

2018-11-13T06:35:22.4133574Z   CSC : error CS0006: Metadata file 'D:\b\4\agent\_work\_temp\.sonarqube\resources\1\SonarAnalyzer.CSharp.dll' could not be found [D:\b\4\agent\_work\40\s\MTIL.Domain\MTIL.Domain.csproj]

2018-11-13T06:35:22.4133574Z   CSC : error CS0006: Metadata file 'D:\b\4\agent\_work\_temp\.sonarqube\resources\1\SonarAnalyzer.dll' could not be found [D:\b\4\agent\_work\40\s\MTIL.Domain\MTIL.Domain.csproj]

2018-11-13T06:35:22.4143340Z

This would make you think that there is something wrong with our SonarQube tasks. Would we an obvious reason right? The strange thing is that we weren’t using SonarQube on our Acceptance release build, so why did the build agent mentions something about SonarQube?

Chapter 1 - The story of the canceled build

After further investigation, I noticed that the problem started happening when another build was canceled. This build was using the same repository(but a different branch) to build our development release. And in this build we were using the SonarQube tasks. So maybe something wasn’t cleaned up correctly?

I killed the VBCSCompiler process (it was blocking some files in the _temp folder) and removed the _temp folder completely. This first seemed to work but after doing one build the problem reappeared.

Chapter 2 - The story of the other running build

So the story continues. I started to monitor the build server for other activities and noticed that the problem reappeared when a development build was running that was using the SonarQube tasks. When I tried to do an Acceptance build after the Development build completed, it succeeded without errors.

Our conclusion was that when another build was running on the same repo that was using the SonarQube tasks, it created some conflict that made the other build fail. Sounds like a bug to me?

As a workaround, we temporarily disable the Development build when we try to create an Acceptance build.

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 ...

Cache stampede: when our cache turned against us

While investigating some performance issues, we ran into an ASP.NET Core API that cached a fairly expensive aggregation query for 60 seconds. Under normal load, that was fine: one request rebuilds the cache, everyone else reads from it. Under peak load, dozens of requests would arrive in that same expiry window, all see a cache miss, and all fire the same expensive query in parallel. The database didn't like that. That was the moment when our caching layer stopped helping and started hurting. A burst of requests comes in at the same time, all miss the cache, and all go hammer the database or the downstream API at once. That's a cache stampede . The cache was supposed to protect our backend, and for a few hundred milliseconds it did the opposite. Why this happens IMemoryCache.GetOrCreate (and its async sibling) looks like it protects you, but it doesn't add any locking on its own. Look at the naive version: public async Task<Report> GetReportAsync(string key) ...

A complex system designed from scratch never works

A few years ago, I worked as an architect on a big mainframe rewrite. I still count it as one of my failures. Not because the technology was wrong, but because I couldn't convince the management team to simplify the approach. Years later, the organization is still struggling to get the new system up and running. I left the project at the time, because I couldn't put my name behind an approach that would take very long and cost a lot of money without a working system to show for it along the way. Gall’s Law That memory keeps coming back to me, because it's a textbook case of Gall's Law playing out in real life. Gall's Law , from John Gall's Systemantics , states it plainly: A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works, and it cannot be patched to make it work. You have to start over with a simple system that works. What does that mean in practice,...

The art of simplicity

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