"Object reference not set to an instance of an object" when publishing a sql project VS 2013

When I try to publish a SQL Project to a database (SQL server 2008 r2) from Visual Studio 2013, I get a dialog box saying

"Object reference not set to an instance of an object" 

and then the publish never finishes (the progress icon keeps spinning).

When I click in the "Output" tab, I don't see any errors there. It says:

========== Build: 4 succeeded or up-to-date, 0 failed, 0 skipped ==========.

When I do a "Schema Compare" from VS 2013 between my project and the production database, I get the same error.

Is there any way to track down how and why VS2013's Data Tools Operations is producing that error?

I ran into this problem again. My problem was that the definition of one of my table-valued functions in the server (the target server of the publish) had a SQLCmd parameter commented out:

CREATE FUNCTION MyProblematicFunc
(   
    @beg_date date,
    @end_date date
)
RETURNS TABLE 
AS
RETURN 
(
    SELECT  
        Name,
        Address,
        --,cast([$(DBreferenceFromVS)].[dbo].[ConvertNumToDate](NumericDate) as DATE) [Create Date] 
        -- ^^^^ This comment above was causing the error on publish and on schema comparison. I had to remove it in the server
    FROM  RandomTable