Could not copy the file "obj\Release\assembly_name.xr.xml" because it was not found

Well, this will be my last blog entry for the year, so I thought I’d post a strange problem I encountered a little while back.

A couple of hours back I found myself stuck with this error while trying to create app packages for the windows 8 store.

The good news is that I was able to make it go away. The not so good news is that I’m not sure what the root cause is/how what I did fixed the issue.

So, I opened up one of the windows 8 apps I was working on after about a year. And of course, it wasn’t working – there were multiple issues including the fact that the test certificates had expired. While fixing these I also decided to create a Windows Phone 8.1 app similar to the windows app along with a shared project to minimize duplication of project artifacts.

This is when I started getting the above error. Building, deploying locally works fine. I was also able to create x86 packages, however no x64 or AnyCPU packages.

Finally what fixed the issue for me was to unload the Windows Phone project and create the app packages. After that it was fine to reload the WP8.1 project. I didn’t get the error again.

Others have faced a similar problem with the “assembly_name.xr.xml” file and doing different things worked for them. Below’s a couple that seem promising: -

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/23410952/unable-to-package-app-on-x64-could-not-copy-the-file-obj-x64-release-project http://stackoverflow.com/questions/24482261/windows-store-app-unable-to-create-x64-app-package