If you're using Azure to host your project and using Team Foundation Server to control the Azure deployment project's source, you might run into an issue where you get a build error saying that ServiceDefinition.csdef and ServiceDefinition.build.csdef cannot be written to because of a lack of permissions to access those files.

The problem is that once it's checked in to TFS, a read-only attribute gets placed on those files. The build process wants to write to those files during the build and cannot because of the -R attribute.

If you run into this, place a pre- and post-build event to handle the attribute:

These events will remove the read-only attribute, build the project, then add the read-only attribute. Problem solved!