Xamarin Studio/Visual Studio Broken - The target "Build" does not exist in the project. (MSB4057)

c# visual-studio-2012 windows-7 xamarin xamarin-studio
wonea picture wonea · Jan 14, 2014 · Viewed 11.8k times · Source

I'm starting out with Xamarin Studio after working with Visual Studio (2012 last) for a good few years. However someone through importing projects, and starting new Android projects I've managed to break Xamarin Studio. Now when starting a new project I get the following error;

The target "Build" does not exist in the project. (MSB4057)

The steps;

Starting a new project

Build result

I've tried to repair my installation, but this made no difference. I've tried doing a reinstall but this made no difference. Other than a complete uninstall and reinstall what options do I have?

I'm using Xamarin Studio 4.2.2, and can confirm I now have the same problem in Visual Studio 2012. Although I can manually build projects using MSBuild.exe, but other than that both IDEs are broken.

Answer

wonea picture wonea · Jan 15, 2014

I've actually managed to track down the problem to a problem with .Net framework setup, somehow by playing around with the build settings within the Xamarin IDE I've corrupted it. To diagnose this problem in Visual Studio 2012 I turned on MSBuild build settings to Diagnostic;

Visual Studio Option

Then identified a problem with C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v4.0.30319\Microsoft.Common.targets, and using a DIFF tool isolating the settings against a machine which had a working build process - copying the missing entry.

Missing Build Setting

This seems to be a bug within Xamarin Studio, when time allows, I'll have to reproduce this for a bug report.

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