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!