Unexplained Build Errors With SQL Server 2014 Database Projects in Visual Studio 2013

I recently came up against a problem when I tried to build/deploy my database in Visual Studio 2013 to an SQL Server 2014  instance, and in response, kept getting a “Build Failed“ error with no error messages (at all) to give me any clue why.

The script was fine because I had actually developed and tested it using the SQL Server Management Studio. What’s more, nothing on-line seemed to help point me to a work-around.

After a bit of investigation though, I did find a solution and that was by following these steps:

  1. In Visual Studio, go to the Tools menu and select Extensions and Updates…
  2. You may see the following. Select it and click update.
  1. This will download a SSDTSetup.exe file which you will need to click on and run.
  2. In the window that appears, agree to the license terms and click install.
  3. A window will then appear and that will do some more downloads/installs - just wait; it doesn’t take too long.
  4. Finally, close Visual Studio, then re-open before trying to build/deploy the script.

Hopefully if you have this problem, you might not after this :-)


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