Sometimes a Gem: How to investigate/debug Microsoft Fakes build error

So I was having a d@%n issue with VS2015, which was refusing to create a fake stub for me, with the not-helpful-at-all error "failed to generate stub type for type (...)". Nothing in the build output log, nothing anywhere to explain what was going on.

Google has never been so unhelpful, which is to say, he helped me only at the fourth or fifth entry.

This post includes a gem:

To debug the build issue, open the assembly.fake xml file in the Fakes folder added automatically to your project. Add the two parameters Diagnostic=”true” Verbosity=”Noisy” to the fake element, like this:

(...)

Then in Tools|Options under Projects and Solutions|Build and Run, change the MSBuild project output verbosity to ‘Diagnostic’. Build again and in the generated output, look for Task “GenerateFakes” 

It worked like a charm. Thanks David!

Name a file or folder with a starting dot

So, in linux hidden folders and files begin with a dot. In windows, it was considered forbidden to create such files (at least I believed it so in FAT32), but now you can see a number of tools creating file system entries with that naming scheme (git, for instance). But, as a user, can I name anything like that?

Let's try to create a folder that is dot-starting:

Sexy naming

The result is not what we wanted:

Type a filename, it says. We just did, dummy!

Well, Windows think we didn't typed a name. That's scary, we did! Or, maybe not? For Windows, it seems, everything after the dot is considered an extension, so, in this case, we just provided an extension for the file (not a name).

To go around this issue, you have to make windows understand that ".dotstarted" is the name, not the extension. And what is the extension in this case, you may ask? The empty string, of course. So, the full name, with the extension, would be...

File with extensions

We just specified the empty string as the extension, making sure Windows understands the ".dotstarted" part as the name. This results on it being correctly created, be it a directory or a simple file.