TFS 2010: An error occurred while validating. HRESULT = '8000000A'

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Hello everyone,

I’ve had a few cases already, where our customers came across a rare problem: They were building Visual Studio Installer projects with Team Build of Team Foundation Server 2010 and the build failed with the error: “An error occurred while validating. HRESULT = '8000000A' ”. When running the build process again, it usually succeeded.

The problem was almost impossible to reproduce and unpredictable in its manner: The customers had several setup projects in their solution and the error appeared seemingly random during the compilation of each of them.

If you ever experience this issue, here is what may be happening and what you can do to work around it:

The error code you are seeing was introduced with this KB: https://support.microsoft.com/kb/2444922

There is a race condition that sometimes used to cause hangs when building setup projects on the command line. It turned out to be an issue that was very risky to tackle, so the decision was made to return this error code (8000000A) instead.

Considering the high risk of solving the problem, and the fact that Visual Studio Installer projects have been deprecated in Visual Studio 2010 (see “Visual Studio Setup and Deployment Projects”: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee721500.aspx, it is very unlikely that this issue will be fixed.

Instead, there are a few recommendations on how to work around the problem:

  • Script the build process to check for this particular error message. If it appears, rebuild the setup project.
  • Attempt to automate Visual Studio to load and build the project in the IDE and not from the command line. (This one is more difficult to implement.)

 

I hope this saves you a headache or two, while trying to figure out where this error code is coming from.

 

Cheers,

Helge Mahrt