aspnet_merge.exe exited with code 1 - WTF?
This was originally posted at vanslaars.com in January of 2007. I haven’t encountered this error message with Visual Studio 2008 yet, but the instructions to update the options DO apply for Visual Studio 2008 as well.
When using a Web Deployment project in Visual Studio 2005, you may encounter an error similar to this: ?aspnet_merge.exe exited with code 1?. This reminds me of the classic ASP “Internal Server Error” message, which basically says ” Something is broken, figure it out and fix it!”.
Well, I have good news, you can get more detail with your error messages by setting a simple option in Visual Studio 2005.
To do this, simply browse to Tools -> Options -> Projects and Solutions -> Build and Run, and in the options to the right of the dialog, switch the “MSBuild project build output verbosity” drop-down value to “Diagnostic“. Now you will see detailed output during the build process, including detailed errors when something goes wrong.