Failed to extract the cab file in the solution

So, failed, now that explains a lot. I while ago i had this error and it got me looking almost everywhere trying to find a solution. Posts about invalid characters in the manifest.xml didn’t provide me a solution since i had no special characters anywhere. However they got me in the right direction, the encoding of the manifest.xml should be UTF-8, and for some reason I found out it wasn’t. So whenever you have the error “failed to extract the cab file in the solution”, do three things

• make sure you don’t have any special characters in your manifest.xml (or any other solution file).
• check the encoding and make sure it’s set to UTF-8.
• according to this post the error can be provoked by having two files with the same name in either the feature.xml, the elementmanifest.xml or the solution.ddf

You can easily check the encoding by opening the file in your notepad.exe and then do a save-as. It will have a property Encoding that should be UTF-8:

Then of course rebuild your .wsp, and deploy it again.