"csc.exe" exited with code 1 in Visual Studio 2012

Question

The Visual Studio 2012 Professional Edition installed on my PC keeps on showing in error list

"csc.exe" exited with code 1 in Visual Studio 2012

instead of the actual error (e.g. syntax error).

How can I fix this?

Answer 1

If this happened to a project that was working before, verify no devenv.exe is running after closing VS:

-Close all the instances of VS

-Open the task manager

-Verify all the devenv.exe actually get closed, or kill the processes

For me, I still had 3 devenv.exe working; I ended these processes, started VS again, and it worked correctly.

Answer 2

I had the same issue.

I tried cleaning the solution, deleting the bin/obj folders, repaired visual studio 2013, dump out detailed build info, nothing helped, CSC still exited with error code 1, no more info than that.

In the end it was caused by two variables (a double and double[]) with the same name in the same code block. Strange error to cause it.

Answer 3

Maybe my unswer is too late, but I want to say, that such error could also happen if you copy that project from another solution. That project was sign with .snk file and you added it to TFS (for ex). VS does not upload .snk by default and when you will use your code in the other place, you will not have that file, but in AssemblyInfo.cs there will be mention that your project contains that file. So, c2c2.exe will not build your solution because of this. Quick solution will be just to commnet this line

[assembly: AssemblyKeyFile( @"....\sn.snk" )]

in AssemblyInfo.cs

Answer 4

This happened to me because I enabled the "treat warnings as error" switch in my project settings and had an unused class member in some file.

I agree that the output window's message is misleading and should be replaced by some message that shows which member cause the build to fail.

Answer 5

I turned on detailed logging in Tools -> Options ... -> Projects and Solutions -> Build and Run.

When you rebuild your solution, you can see the command that gives the error. Copy the command, open a cmd window, go to your project folder, paste and run the command. The output will give you the actual error.

It's some sort of bug in VS2012 I suppose. You could try cleaning your solution, restart Visual Studio and try rebuilding? The above solution should point you in the right direction for finding your error. When opening the file containing the error, the errors should appear in the error list.