Eclipse shows an error on android project but can find the error

My favorite Android platform on which I can blog so much since its just full of strange behaviors. Latest was this problem where when I build my project then I would see a red mark on the project folder saying the build failed. But then on exanding all folders I would not find any error.

I was looking everywhere what is the problem. Since I am not using ANT and I dont even have a build.log which can tell me exactly what is the problem. In the past following had worked

1) Clean the project

2) Build it again.

No success.

1) Close eclipse and repeat above two steps.

That had worked in the past but this time the error was nasty :).

So I spent some time searching on net on how to find eclipse build logs. And here is the solution.

1) On Eclipse error log can be seen in Window -> Show View -> Problems

2) Now if you are like me who has selected Project -> Build Automatically, then on startup eclipse tries to load all projects in the workspace and will try to build them if they havent been already. The effect is that I have many projects for which external reference have not been resolved. This means they have lots of errors and the Problems log was full with > 3000 errors.

3) I needed to find the error for only my project. Solution for 2 is that clean all projects and unselect Build Automatically option.

4) If Problems log is still full. Right click-> Select all. Then Right click -> Delete. Now Problems log must be empty.

5) Build only your project again to see the problem.

 

So as is I got this funny error. Error generating final archive: Debug certificate expired on 7/30/10 10:42
PM!
Now what, another search on the web told me that Android needs a certificate to sign the applications before they get installed. Oh well!

So the solution to my problem was. Go to c:\users\<user name>\.android    folder. Delete debug.keystore file and now build in eclipse again. It will create the keystore again and now we can get back to work!!