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Building Azure solutions on your build server

Out-of-the-box building your Azure projects on the build server will fail. You probably get an error like below:

c:\builds\AzureProject\AzureProject1.ccproj(57,11): error MSB4019: The imported project "C:\Program Files\MSBuild\Microsoft\Cloud Service\v1.0\Microsoft.CloudService.targets" was not found. Confirm that the path in the <Import> declaration is correct, and that the file exists on disk.

Probably the easiest solution is to install the Windows Azure SDK on your build server. However the SDK installer checks if some components like Visual Studio, IIS, … are available on the server. You can start to install all these components, but then you are polluting your clean build environment.

So what is a (better) alternative?

The solution we used was to just copy the necessary files and components. This means:

  • Copying the files under  C:\Program Files\MSBuild\Microsoft\Cloud Service\v1.0\ to the same location on your build server.( Program Files(x86) if you are on a 64bit system)
  • Copying the files under “C:\Program Files\Windows Azure SDK\v1.0\bin" to your build server.
  • As a last step, you’ll have to update the registry because the Microsoft.CloudService.targets file searches for the following keys:
    • HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Microsoft SDKs\ServiceHosting\v1.0@InstallPath
    • HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Microsoft SDKs\ServiceHosting\v1.0@ToolsVersionSupportLevel
  • Export these registry keys and import them on your build server.

That did the trick for us. Anyone with a better solution?

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