Byte Order Mark
Okay, so one day I found myself at work, and things took an unexpected turn: the automatic releases in one of our projects had inexplicably come to a halt. The puzzling part? Just the week before, everything was running smoothly. To add to the mystery, my colleague had made a single commit without altering the pipeline configuration at all 🤯.
Our automation is written in MSBuild using GitInfo and other custom targets to modify its output to my company’s standards. The project is versioned with VERSION file, which contains SemVer. To customize the release tag, we pass the TagVersion property, which must be prefixed with the SemVer from the VERSION file e.g. -p:TagVersion="1.2.3-internal"
Now, let’s get back to the failed pipeline… This pipeline is used across all of our C# projects, but it still worked there. How is this project suddenly different?
In the pipeline, the MSBuild failed with the following error: error MSB4018: System.ArgumentException: PackageVersion string specified '5.0.2' is invalid. But why? The version is just the copied value from the VERSION file, so where’s the problem?
