The target "GatherAllFilesToPublish" does not exist in the project

Question

I've checked that the same error occurred in the past with earlier vs .net versions but I am facing this issue in VS 2017 while trying to upgrade from VS Community 15.3.5 to 15.4.

• I first installed using the web installer by choosing the options,
• some how there were a couple of errors & the download + installation took over 9+ hours

visual studio was working and compiling project except that this had the problem 'The target "GatherAllFilesToPublish" does not exist in the project'.

Then I tried downloading the entire setup using "vs_community.exe --layout "C:\MyFolder" --lang en-US" which again took over 9 hours to finish download. Re-ran the setup choosing Repair, again the same issue.

Is any one aware of a quicker way to solve this above problem?

Answer 1

I had same issue (Visual Studio 2017). Install - " MSBuild.Microsoft.VisualStudio.Web.targets " nuget package to visual studio. And then try to publish.

Answer 2

I had similar problem and it solved by changing csproj file:

<Import Project="$(MSBuildExtensionsPath32)\Microsoft\VisualStudio\v10.0\WebApplications\Microsoft.WebApplication.targets" Condition="false" />

changed to

<Import Project="$(MSBuildExtensionsPath32)\Microsoft\VisualStudio\v15.0\WebApplications\Microsoft.WebApplication.targets" Condition="true" />