Before I share how to install and use MS BUILD 14 without installing Visual Studio(VS) let me describe the reason why I needed it. The build server uses ms build 14 and on my local machine VS 2019 uses ms build 15. And I run in a problem after I did some nuget package update. It builds successfully on my local machine but when I pushed my code to the build server the next error occurred: Multiple assemblies with equivalent identity have been imported: C:\somepath\libname.dll Remove one of the duplicate references. Looks like MS BUILD 14 can't resolve duplicate lib reference.
Thus, I needed to fix ambiguous library references and test the build locally. For this, I needed to MS Build 14 which is absent if you have a VS2019 only. To fix this problem check my next steps:
- Download MS Build 14
- Install MS Build Tools 15 (MSBuild 14.0)
- Optional step – Download Microsoft.WebApplication.targets
- Build with MSBuild.exe
1. Download MS Build 14
MS Build 14 is a part of Microsoft Build Tools 2015. You can download it here.
Pic 1 - Microsoft Build Tools 15 – Download Page
2. Install MS Build Tools 15 (MSBuild 14.0)
The installation process is pretty simple. Just run BuildTools_Full.exe and click Install.
Pic 2 - Microsoft Build Tools 15 - Install
After the installation you should notice the next folder:
C:\Program Files (x86)\MSBuild\14.0\Bin
3. Optional step – Download Microsoft.WebApplication.targets
After MS Build Tools was installed I tried to build my Web API project. But I received the next error: The imported project "C:\Program Files (x86)\MSBuild\Microsoft\VisualStudio\v14 .0\WebApplications\Microsoft.WebApplication.targets" was not found. Confirm that the path in the
Pic 3 - Microsoft.WebApplication.targets unbox
4. Build with MSBuild.exe
CMD: C:\Program Files (x86)\MSBuild\14.0\Bin\amd64\MSBuild.exe D:\myProject\myProj1.sln /property:Configuration=Release
Pic 4 - Build with MSBuild.exe
BTW, I used FAR manage to navigate. For me, it is a bit easy than a regular CMD line.