I have web deployment project with "Allow this precompiled site to be updatable" set to "false". If "Output Assemblies" set to anything but "Merge individual folder output to its own assembly" I get the following error:

"aspnet_merge.exe exited with code 1".

I turned on detailed logging in MSBuild and here is the error:

An error occurred when merging assemblies: Access to the path 'C:\Projects\Rewrite\Engineering\Source\Mail\SendMailWebDeploy\Debug\bin\SendMailWeb.pdb' is denied.

debug file seems to be locked by another process.
Are sure your application is not running while deploying? and in debug mode ?

In case just restart Visual Studio and retry.

I finally figured what was causing this: name of the output assembly. If it is set to the same name as the project name (in my case SendMailWeb) then I get an error. Looks like it is due to the fact that WDP names its output assembly the same. After renaming output to SendMail everything works. Thanks everyone!

I had this error and discovered that it was caused by having a DataSet with the Same name as my ASPX page, example TaskRate.XSD and TaskRate.ASPX.  I renamed my page and the error went away.  I hope this helps others.

Gerry

this problem occur in  aspnet_merge.exe, because 2 page have same class name in project.

When u compile, if u choose " single page assemblies", this error don't occur. When u choose merge assemblies, it will occur.

To solve this problem  is very easy. Find the page have the same class name and change it. 

Xhuyvn.