Error MSB3030: Could not copy the file "StaticWebAssets.xml" because it was not found.

A collegae contacted me today with the following question; his builds started to fail suddenly with the following error:

##[error]C:\Program Files\dotnet\sdk\6.0.101\Microsoft.Common.CurrentVersion.targets(5100,5): Error MSB3030: Could not copy the file "StaticWebAssets.xml" because it was not found.

He was wondering if something was changed on the build server and indeed he was right; we recently installed the .NET 6 SDK on the build server.

As you can see in the error message, the project was built using the .NET 6 SDK.

To fix the error we provided a short and long term solution.

The short term solution

The short term solution was triggering a clean solution before building the project. This will remove all remaining build artifacts and guarantees a clean slate.

To achieve this in Azure DevOps using the Classic pipeline:

Go to your Build pipeline
Select the Get Sources Tab
Set the Clean value to true
Save the pipeline and run the build

Remark: This also fixes the problem in Visual Studio, do a Clean solution before triggering a build.

If you are using the yaml pipelines, you can set this at the workspace level:

The long term solution

To avoid this problem in the future, you can define the SDK version that should be used through a global.json file:

You can create a new global.json file in the current directory by executing the dotnet new command, similar to the following example:

dotnet new globaljson --sdk-version 3.1

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) ...

The role of ActivitySource in OpenTelemetry for .NET

While doing some pair programming to integrate OpenTelemetry tracing to a .NET application, we had a discussion on how to use the ActivitySource . It looks simple. You new one up, give it a name, start an activity, done. The discussion started when we added a second ActivitySource with the exact same name in a different class. This made us wonder: "Are we duplicating traces now? Is this a memory leak? Do we need a singleton?" So we decided to dig deeper. This post is what we learned… What ActivitySource actually is ActivitySource is part of System.Diagnostics , not part of the OpenTelemetry NuGet packages. Microsoft built tracing primitives directly into the BCL, and OpenTelemetry's .NET SDK simply listens to them. This is why you can add distributed tracing to a library without taking a dependency on OpenTelemetry at all. An ActivitySource is a factory for Activity objects, and an Activity is .NET's name for what OpenTelemetry calls a span.(don’t ask m...

The art of simplicity

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