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I've been having some troubles with my TeamCity Build Agent recently. I started running out of space on the build machine so I opted to remove some old instances of Visual Studio (2013) and also to switch to using the Visual Studio 2017 Build Tools only (which included uninstalling the previous full installation of VS2017 Enterprise that was present). I think that as a result of this process some important build components have been unintentionally removed but it is unclear to me exactly what they are. My projects use a combination of NuGet packages which include NETStandard libraries v1.3 and some .NET libraries of 4.6.1 framework. The build errors I get only occur on my libraries that are netstandard1.3 portable libraries they all read: 

C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2017\BuildTools\MSBuild\15.0\
bin\Microsoft.Common.CurrentVersion.targets(1122, 5): error MSB3644: 
The reference assemblies for framework ".NETPortable,Version=v5.0" were not found. 
To resolve this, install the SDK or Targeting Pack for this framework version
or retarget your application to a version of the framework for which you have the SDK
or Targeting Pack installed. 
Note that assemblies will be resolved from the Global Assembly Cache (GAC)
and will be used in place of reference assemblies. 
Therefore your assembly may not be correctly targeted for the framework you intend

Previously these projects were building fine on this server so I am assuming that whatever qualifies as the .NETPortable,Version=v5.0 libraries have been removed. How do I get them back? From what I can see of the Build tools I've installed all the available features, the netcore, all frameworks but still it doesn't work. Any advice would be most welcome.

Athari
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The Senator
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1 Answers1

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In order for me to solve this, I tried a few things which I shall list here and then tell you my assumptions.

  1. Ran the repair of the MS Build tools (VS2017)
  2. Tried installing VS2013 again (see reason below)
  3. Converted my projects from the old PCL style project format to the official .netstandard project type.

My suspicion is that the MS build tools were not broken, although reading around various forums suggested that VS2013 perhaps has the older targets for supporting PCL which weren't natively included in VS2017 anymore. I tried re-installing that but it didn't help so I think the final solution was as simple as converting to official netstandard projects (from legacy PCL project types) and everything started to build again.

For whatever reason, I found that I had to subsequently switch to using the new MSTest NuGet packages for my tests to work again too.

The Senator
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