After I uninstalled Visual Studio 2012, the deployment package creation script that builds and publishes a project using MSBuild started throwing a lovely exception:

.csproj(795,3): error MSB4019: The imported project “C:\Program Files (x86)\MSBuild\Microsoft\VisualStudio\v11.0\We bApplications\Microsoft.WebApplication.targets” was not found. Confirm that the path in the declaration is correct, and that the file exists on disk.

From the error, I can tell that MSBuild is using the wrong Visual Studio version. My first thought was to to tell MSBuild to use v12 to build target by adding a VisualStudioVersion environment variable /p:VisualStudioVersion=12.0 but that resulted in a new error that was a little more confusing:

C:\Program Files (x86)\MSBuild\Microsoft\VisualStudio\v12.0\Web\Transform\Microsoft.Web.Publishing.AspNetCompileMerge.targets(132,5): error : Can’t find the valid AspnetMergePath

I guess something has changed, and indeed, after searching I found that that yes MSBuild now ships as a part of Visual Stuido.

So rather than having MSBuild shipped as a component of a .NET framework, it is now a stand alone package that comes with Visual Studio and each version corresponds to the Visual Studio version with it’s own toolsets. So the new MSBuild will be under:

On 32-bit machines they can be found in: C:\Program Files\MSBuild\12.0\bin

On 64-bit machines the 32-bit tools will be under: C:\Program Files (x86)\MSBuild\12.0\bin

So if you are building you project using C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v4.0.30319\msbuild.exe, without Visual Studio 2012 installed, it will no longer work, and you will need to switch your build tool to use a new msbuild 12.0 in C:\Program Files (x86)\MSBuild\12.0\Bin\MSBuild.exe.

That’s it, hopefully this post will save someone some time.