Silly old VS2013 and XML Serialization

So had a bit of a gotcha this morning which cost me a good twenty minutes and some little anger. 

I kept getting an error when compiling in release mode – Could not find file [ProjectFolder]\obj\Root.Project.Namespace.XmlSerializers.dll

Weird. Firstly, I couldn’t see a reference to this phantom project anywhere. Nor any text reference anywhere in the project. 

Turns out that Generate Serialization Assembly was turned on in the project settings.

This is to do with .Net’s treacly slow XML serialization and optimizing for that. Actually, that’s an idea – may do a post on that because it’s kind of interesting, and a lot of existing soutions are quite hacky. 

For now, it’s a bit of a gotcha, duly stored and noted.