dotnet/msbuild

Improve log on GenerateResource task

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#2,618 opened on Oct 10, 2017

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Area: DebuggabilityArea: Task: GenerateResourcehelp wantedtriaged

Description

When investigating on why my incremental build was not that incremental I had a hard time understanding why a specific resource file was always recompiled. It took me hours to download / compile and understand correctly what was goind wrong.

In my case I was hitting: https://github.com/Microsoft/msbuild/blob/a9f64ebd108702c3fc65339c66cb124217854524/src/Tasks/GenerateResource.cs#L1428-L1433

But my file is not missing, the path is only badly formatted: ...\Resources\BuildTagIcon.png (notice the threed dots). For NativeMethodsShared.GetFileAttributesEx it's not valid but it's ok for the resource generator.

We sure can fix this issue but I guess it would be more useful to add some logs. Once I knew which resource was the culprit it was quite easy to understand why.

Contributor guide

Tech stack
csharp
Domain
build system
Issue type
feature
DifficultyEstimated implementation difficulty for a new contributor, from 1 for very small changes to 5 for expert-level work.
2
Estimated timeA rough time range for an experienced contributor to investigate, implement, test, and prepare a pull request.
1-3 hours
Activity statusHow available the issue appears right now: fresh, active, stale, blocked, or waiting on maintainer input.
fresh
ClarityHow clearly the issue explains the expected change, acceptance criteria, and next step.
clear
Prerequisites
basic C# knowledge
Newbie friendlinessA 1-100 score estimating how approachable this issue is for first-time contributors.
70
Research direction
Examine the GenerateResource.cs file at line 1428-1433 in the MSBuild repository. The issue suggests adding logging when a resource file path is malformed (e.g., with triple dots). Look at how other tasks log similar issues using the existing logging infrastructure (e.g., TaskLoggingHelper). Add a warning or error message that indicates the problematic file path and the specific condition (like GetFileAttributesEx failure). Ensure the logging is clear enough for developers to identify which resource file is causing the incremental build to fail. Consider following the pattern used elsewhere in the file for logging.