error MSB4019: The imported project "..../WebApplications\Microsoft.WebApplication.targets" was not found

Question

My web API project builds fine from Visual Studio. I was trying to setup the CI in the github workflows using below yml.

name: web-api-ci-pipeline

on:
  push:
    branches: [ main ]
  pull_request:
    branches: [ main ]

jobs:
  build-and-test:
    runs-on: windows-latest
    env:
      SOLUTIONPATH: celt2/API/CELTAPI.sln

    steps:
    - uses: actions/checkout@v2
    - name: Setup .NET
      uses: actions/setup-dotnet@v1
      with:
        dotnet-version: 5.0.x
    - name: Build code
      run: dotnet build ${{env.SOLUTIONPATH}}

But, in the build step I am getting below error:

D:\a\CELT2\CELT2\celt2\API\CELTAPI\CELTAPI.csproj(153,3): error MSB4019: The imported project "C:\Users\runneradmin\AppData\Local\Microsoft\dotnet\sdk\5.0.401\Microsoft\VisualStudio\v16.0\WebApplications\Microsoft.WebApplication.targets" was not found. Confirm that the expression in the Import declaration "C:\Users\runneradmin\AppData\Local\Microsoft\dotnet\sdk\5.0.401\Microsoft\VisualStudio\v16.0\WebApplications\Microsoft.WebApplication.targets" is correct, and that the file exists on disk.

CELTAPI.csproj:

Can anyone please point me out what am I doing wrong?

Answer 1

It looks like you are building one of the branches that contain a classic ASP.NET (not ASP.NET Core) project, which is unsupported by the .NET SDK.

If you need to build classic ASP.NET Applications, I recommend using the setup-msbuild action instead of setup-dotnethttps://github.com/marketplace/actions/setup-msbuild and run msbuild -p:Configuration=Release -restore ${{env.SOLUTIONPATH}} instead