VS compiling BizTalk project cannot write to output directory

Question

Sometimes (but not all of the time) when I compile my BizTalk project from with VS 2005, I receive the error:

Could not write to output file 'e:\...\obj\Development\whatever.dll' The process cannot access the file because it is being used by another process.

It's Visual Studio that's using it. I just close the IDE and re-open and it will work.

I have had this problem for a while now, I just live with it but it's becoming increasingly frustrating. Does anyone know what's causing this? It's not something specific to my project, it happens for all of my projects.

Answer 1

So I think there is a bug in VS 2005. This is on a project that references my whatever.dll. I needed to set copy local to true and it compiles ok. I can set back to false but it will eventually error again. Even though I want copy local to false as everything BizTalk must be in the GAC, setting it to true in my case causes no harm, so I just leave them like that.

Answer 2

Yes, this is a bug in VS2005, that also exists in VS2008.

But in VS2010 (BizTalk 2010), it almost never occurs. You can still get this problem, if you reference a project in one solution, and have the same project referenced in another solution, and both VS2010 solutions running at the same time.