External VS2013 build error “error MSB4019: The im

Question

I am building a project through the command line and not inside Visual Studio 2013. Note, I had upgraded my project from Visual Studio 2012 to 2013. The project builds fine inside the IDE. Also, I completely uninstalled VS2012 first, rebooted, and installed VS2013. The only version of Visual Studio that I have is 2013 Ultimate.

ValidateProjects:
    39>path_to_project.csproj(245,3): error MSB4019: The imported project "C:\Program Files (x86)\MSBuild\Microsoft\VisualStudio\v11.0\WebApplications\Microsoft.WebApplication.targets" was not found. Confirm that the path in the <Import> declaration is correct, and that the file exists on disk.
    39>Done Building Project "path_to_project.csproj" (Clean target(s)) -- FAILED.

Here are the two lines in question:

<Import Project="$(VSToolsPath)\WebApplications\Microsoft.WebApplication.targets" Condition="'$(VSToolsPath)' != ''" />
<Import Project="$(MSBuildExtensionsPath32)\Microsoft\VisualStudio\v12.0\WebApplications\Microsoft.WebApplication.targets" Condition="false" />

The original second line was v10.0, but I manually changed that to v12.0.

$(VSToolsPath) elongates from what I see to the v11.0 (VS2012) folder, which obviously is not there anymore. The path should have been to v12.0.

C:\Program Files (x86)\MSBuild\Microsoft\VisualStudio\v12.0\WebApplications\

I tried specifying VSToolsPath in my system environment variables table, but the external build utility still uses v11.0. I tried searching through the registry and that came up with nothing.

Sadly, I do not see any easy way to get the exact command line used. I use a build tool.

Thoughts?

Answer 1

In my case i just comment below line by opening .csproj file and did the trick

.<!-- <Import Project="..\PRPJECTNAME.targets" /> -->

My problem may be different but i am dragged here, but this may help someone.

I picked a single web project from my solution and try to open it as a stand alone project which was making issue, after above heck am able to solve issue.

Answer 2

I found I was missing the WebApplications folder on my local PC, did not install with Visual Studio 2017 like it had when I was using 2012.

Answer 3

giammin's solution is partially incorrect. You SHOULD NOT remove that entire PropertyGroup from your solution. If you do, MSBuild's "DeployTarget=Package" feature will stop working. This feature relies on the "VSToolsPath" being set.

<PropertyGroup>
  <!-- VisualStudioVersion is incompatible with later versions of Visual Studio.  Removing. -->
  <!-- <VisualStudioVersion Condition="'$(VisualStudioVersion)' == ''">10.0</VisualStudioVersion> -->
  <!-- VSToolsPath is required by MSBuild for features like "DeployTarget=Package" -->
  <VSToolsPath Condition="'$(VSToolsPath)' == ''">$(MSBuildExtensionsPath32)\Microsoft\VisualStudio\v$(VisualStudioVersion)</VSToolsPath>
</PropertyGroup>
...
<Import Project="$(VSToolsPath)\WebApplications\Microsoft.WebApplication.targets" Condition="'$(VSToolsPath)' != ''" />

Answer 4

I had tried all of the above solutions and still no luck. I had heard people installing visual studio on their build servers to fix it, but I only had 5gb of free spaces so I just copied C:\Program Files (x86)\MSBuild\Microsoft\VisualStudio to my build server and called it a day. Started working after that, using team city 9.x and visual studio 2013.

Answer 5

This is closely related but may or may not fix OPs specific issue. In my case I was trying to automate the deployment of an Azure site using VS2013. Building and deploying via VS works, however, using MSBuild showed a similar error around the "targets". Turns out MSBuild is different under VS2013, and is now part of VS and not the .Net Framework (see http://timrayburn.net/blog/visual-studio-2013-and-msbuild/). Basically, use the correct version of MSBuild:

OLD, VS2012

C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v4.0.30319\MSBuild.exe

NEW, VS2013

C:\Program Files (x86)\MSBuild\12.0\bin\msbuild.exe

Newer, VS2015

C:\Program Files (x86)\MSBuild\14.0\Bin\msbuild.exe

Newer still, VS2017 (not fully testing but discovered - they've moved things around a bit)

C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2017\Professional\MSBuild\15.0\Bin\msbuild.exe

Answer 6

Running this in the commandline will fix the problem also. SETX VisualStudioVersion "12.0"