At my current client we use MSBuild and Octopus to set up automated builds and continuous integration for our solutions. Every commit, a build server grabs the latest code, MSBuild compiles it, a NuGet package gets dropped into a drop folder, and Octopus then pulls the package from a package feed. Then we manually deploy as needed. This usually works pretty well, except… SSIS.
Builds for one of our SSIS packages started failing in July. A couple developers took some stabs at getting it working again, but were unable to do so. Then the backlog started filling. Seven months later, and here I am trying to resolve the build. I’m basically starting from scratch, so I don’t have a lot of knowledge of what may have caused the initial failures. But no problem!
I was able to resolve the build problems by logging directly into the build server and running build commands locally to get more specific errors. Eventually, I identified a third party module that was not present on our build server as the culprit of the problems, despite a couple red herrings. I discuss my process below.