The 'Publish' target is not supported without specifying a target framework

Question

Using Visual Studio 2017, I created an ASP.NET Core site using .NET Framework. (I do not have a project.json, I have a VS2017 project with .cproj)

My target is x64 Windows 2008R2. The beginning of my .cproj looks like follow:

<Project Sdk="Microsoft.NET.Sdk.Web" ToolsVersion="15.0">
  <PropertyGroup>
    <TargetFrameworks>net462</TargetFrameworks>
    <RuntimeIdentifier>win7-x64</RuntimeIdentifier>
  </PropertyGroup>
  <PropertyGroup Condition="'$(Configuration)|$(Platform)'=='Debug|x64'">
    <PlatformTarget>x64</PlatformTarget>
    <OutputPath>bin\Debug</OutputPath>
    <DefineConstants>TRACE;DEBUG</DefineConstants>
  </PropertyGroup>
  <PropertyGroup Condition="'$(Configuration)|$(Platform)'=='Release|x64'">
    <PlatformTarget>x64</PlatformTarget>
    <OutputPath>bin\Release</OutputPath>
    <Optimize>True</Optimize>
  </PropertyGroup>
  ...

However, and while I am targetting .NET 4.6.2 only, when I try to publish I am getting this error

C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2017\Enterprise\MSBuild\Sdks\Microsoft.NET.Sdk\buildCrossTargeting\Microsoft.NET.Sdk.targets(31,5): Error : The 'Publish' target is not supported without specifying a target framework. The current project targets multiple frameworks, please specify the framework for the published application.

While looking for solutions online, I encountered people having the same problem but they actually have many targets, however, in my case I am not sure why I am even getting it.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

There was a change in the .csproj template (https://github.com/dotnet/sdk/issues/251). Instead of <TargetFrameworks> you need to use <TargetFramework>:

<PropertyGroup>
   <TargetFramework>net462</TargetFramework>
   <RuntimeIdentifier>win7-x64</RuntimeIdentifier>
 </PropertyGroup>