Azure Publish error, The Directory is not empty.

Question

Hi, though  not always , I keep getting the error The Directory is not empty, when i try to publish my azure project, and publish fails, nothing I do, like clean, build rebuild, solution , role or cloud project helps. Please help.

 

 

Error    150    The directory is not empty.
    C:\Program Files\MSBuild\Microsoft\VisualStudio\v10.0\Windows Azure Tools\1.4\Microsoft.WindowsAzure.targets    2854    5    MyCastingAzure

 

 

 

<CSPack
      ServiceDefinitionFile="@(TargetServiceDefinition)"
      Output="@(PublishServicePackage)"
      PackRoles="@(Roles)"
      SiteMapping="@(SiteMapping)"
      RoleProperties="@(RoleProperties)"
      CopyOnly="false"
      >
    </CSPack>

 

 

Answer 1

Hi Swarajb73,

Thanks for your question.

I am trying to involve someone familiar with this topic to further look at this issue. There might be some time delay. Appreciate your patience.

Thanks.

---

Wenchao Zeng
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Answer 2

It is known that some anti-virus software realtime scan can cause this error. I suggest you to adding proper virus scanning isolation on the related paths for a quick test.

If the problem is not solved, you can run csPack command to test the packaging task. Use process monitor to trace the command execution and examine the file system operations. I suggest this because the error message points to some file system access failure.

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Thanks & Regards,

Emma

Microsoft Online Community Support

 

Answer 3

Hi, thanks a million for your suggestions, i tried disabling my antivirus and package it worked twice , so I am hoping that is the solution, will try it a few more times but I think the antivirus was the problem. thanks a lot again. had me frustrated for months.

Answer 4

I have also being frustrated by this exact same problem for weeks. It would work maybe 2 out of every 10 attempts, and the rest of the time I would encounter “The Directory is not empty” error.

To troubleshoot I proceeded to stop every single windows service one by one to attempt to identify the problem, which I finally did. In my case it was not the AV software, it was a process called IDriveE which is part of an online backup solution called iDrive.

As Emma Em pointed out above, I suspect this process is interfering with file system access in some way. As soon as I stopped this process, I can publish straight from Visual Studio without any more of these errors.

If you are having the same problem and come across this thread, I recommend that you inspect your system for any services or processes that might be affecting the file system, or doing some sort of a continuous scan on the drive. This is most likely the culprit.