In my Azure project I have a worker role and a wcf role. When compiling it failed (with no obvious reason) with this message in the output window:

Error: Object reference not set to an instance of an object

There is no other reference as to where this error would originate from. So it has to come from the builder.

The “fishy” solution to this problem (in my case) was to unload the worker role project, rebuild, then load the worker project again and rebuild all again. Now it is working again.

This is a workaround that worked for me in this instance. I didn’t investigate the root cause of this problem. On StackOverflow there are some threads describing the same problem, so I suppose that there will shortly be updates to VS / Azure SDK to solve this problem.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/19162614/object-reference-not-set-to-an-instance-of-an-object-when-building-my-cloud-pr