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Inconsistency

In which different tools behave in different ways

One of those days when everything seemed to go wrong at work this afternoon. Partly because of things I broke, partly because of things that other people had messed up before I got there, partly because of things that seemed to go wrong entirely by themselves.

For example - warning, dull technical paragraph ahead - I hadn’t realised that Visual Studio can cope remarkably well with slightly-corrupt solution files and will happily skip over and ignore the errors; but other tools such as MSBuild will throw the whole file out, curl up and cry into their beer. Visual Studio, whilst ignoring the error, also won’t fix it. Therefore, when git is a git and accidentally corrupts a solution file in a merge, you will have no problems at all on a local build, but mysterious and hard-to-fix total failures happen whenever you try to build on the build server.

Update, September 8th 2020: At some point I will write a proper blog post about what happened here, how to spot it is going to happen, and how to fix it, because although MSBuild is going away now we are in the .NET Core world there are still plenty of people out there using .NET Framework, and they still occasionally face this problem.