Recently I was upgrading one of my projects from Visual Studio 2015 to Visual Studio 2017 (including converting from project.json and .xproj to .csproj), when I hit an error like this:

Microsoft.Common.CurrentVersion.targets(2867,5): error MSB3552: Resource file "**/*.resx" cannot be found.

It turns out this is caused by a long-standing MSBuild bug: Wildcard expansion is silently disabled when a wildcard includes a file over MAX_PATH. The Microsoft.NET.Sdk.DefaultItems.props file bundled with .NET Core includes a section that looks like this:

<EmbeddedResource 
  Include="**/*.resx" 
  Exclude="$(DefaultItemExcludes);$(DefaultExcludesInProjectFolder)"
  Condition=" '$(EnableDefaultEmbeddedResourceItems)' == 'true' "
/>

When MSBuild tries to expand the **/*.resx wildcard, it hits this bug, resulting in the wildcard not being expanded properly. Some other MSBuild task interprets the **/*.resx as a literal file name, and crashes and burns as a result.

In my case, my build server was running an old version of npm, which is known to create extremely long file paths. The way to "fix" this is by reducing the nesting of your folders. If you're using npm, upgrading to a newer version (or switching to Yarn) should fix the issue. Otherwise, you may need to move your project to a different directory, such as a directory in the root of C:\.

Well, back to posting coding-related blog posts, for now anyways 😛. Seeing as a lot of people seem to be confused by Object Oriented Programming, I thought I'd post a quick (or maybe not so quick) post about what OOP is, the main features, and how it can benefit you. This is paraphrased from an assignment I had on OOP last semester at university. I use C# code examples throughout this, but the concepts are very similar in other languages. Note that in this post, I assume you know the basics of programming, and just want to learn more about object orientation.

Now, let's begin looking at what OOP actually means. At its core, the Object Oriented paradigm consists of classes and objects. A class is a “thing” or entity that has a purpose, and an object is an instance of this entity. For example, a Car would be a class, and my car would be an object (instance of the Car class).

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