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Building Silverlight projects on a 64bit build server

If you are building Silverlight projects on the ISOAPP502 build server, it’s possible that the build will fail with following error:

C:\Program Files (x86)\MSBuild\Microsoft\Silverlight\v3.0\Microsoft.Silverlight.Common.targets (101): The Silverlight 3 SDK is not installed.

C:\Program Files (x86)\MSBuild\Microsoft\Silverlight\v3.0\Microsoft.Silverlight.Common.targets (101): The Silverlight 3 SDK is not installed.

C:\Program Files (x86)\MSBuild\Microsoft\Silverlight\v4.0\Microsoft.Silverlight.Common.targets (104): The Silverlight 4 SDK is not installed.

C:\Program Files (x86)\MSBuild\Microsoft\Silverlight\v4.0\Microsoft.Silverlight.Common.targets (104): The Silverlight 4 SDK is not installed.

At first you should think that the SDK wasn’t installed on the build server. But connecting to the build server confirmed that the SDK was available.

The reason of the failure had to be found somewhere else. It is caused by the fact that the new build engine runs by default in a 64bit process. As Silverlight applications only support 32bit, you’ll have to update your build definition.

Therefore:

  1. Open Team Explorer 2010
  2. Open the Builds section on your Team Project.
  3. Right click on the build definition and choose Edit Build Definition.
  4. In the Build Definition go to the Process tab.
  5. Click Advanced and change the MsBuild Platform option from Auto to X86.

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