Azure Pipelines: Dotnet publish fails with exit code 1 after migrating to .NET Core 3.1

Question

I have an Azure Pipeline which is setup to do:

• Use .NET Core SDK 3.1.x
• Dotnet restore
• Dotnet Build
• Dotnet Publish

Use .NET Core task looks like that and it run before all others mentioned above:

All the jobs are executed successfully apart the Dotnet Publish

This job crashes with these errors:

AND

[error]Error: The process 'C:\hostedtoolcache\windows\dotnet\dotnet.exe' failed with exit code 1

[warning]Info: Azure Pipelines hosted agents have been updated to contain .Net Core 3.x SDK/Runtime along with 2.2 & 2.1. Unless you have locked down a SDK version for your project(s), 3.x SDK might be picked up which might have breaking behavior as compared to previous versions.

I tried different version variation for Use .NET Core SDK Job, however all of them lead to the same error.

Publish job:

Thanks in advance. Appreciate if someone could give me a clue what I might be doing wrong.

Answer 1

Found out that issue had nothing to do with the Azure Pipelines, it was caused by the package referenced in my .csproj:

<DotNetCliToolReference Include="Microsoft.DotNet.Xdt.Tools" Version="2.0.0" />

This package has a dependency for .NETCoreApp 2.0

Found that author created a new package: https://www.nuget.org/packages/DotNet.Xdt# https://github.com/nil4/dotnet-transform-xdt

Which is now compatible with .NET Core 3.x

Answer 2

This is what I do to install a specific version of dotnet core:

- task: UseDotNet@2
  inputs:
    packageType: 'sdk'
    version: '3.1.101'

I the only difference I found you have to specify the SDK version exactly of the SDK build.