The imported project “C:\Microsoft.CSharp.targets” was not found

Question

I got this error today when trying to open a Visual Studio 2008 project in Visual Studio 2005:

The imported project \"C:\\Microsoft.C

Answer 1

After trying to restore, closing VS, deleting the failed package, reopening, trying to restore, multiple times I just deleted everything in packages and when I did a restore and it worked perfectly.

Answer 2

In my case, I opened my .csproj file in notepad and removed the following three lines. Worked like a charm:

<Import Project="..\packages\Microsoft.CodeDom.Providers.DotNetCompilerPlatform.1.0.0\build\Microsoft.CodeDom.Providers.DotNetCompilerPlatform.props" Condition="Exists('..\packages\Microsoft.CodeDom.Providers.DotNetCompilerPlatform.1.0.0\build\Microsoft.CodeDom.Providers.DotNetCompilerPlatform.props')" />
<Import Project="..\packages\Microsoft.Net.Compilers.1.0.0\build\Microsoft.Net.Compilers.props" Condition="Exists('..\packages\Microsoft.Net.Compilers.1.0.0\build\Microsoft.Net.Compilers.props')" />
<Import Project="..\packages\Microsoft.Net.Compilers.1.3.2\build\Microsoft.Net.Compilers.props" Condition="Exists('..\packages\Microsoft.Net.Compilers.1.3.2\build\Microsoft.Net.Compilers.props')" />

Answer 3

I used to have this following line in the csproj file:

<Import Project="$(MSBuildExtensionsPath32)\Microsoft\VisualStudio\v10.0\WebApplications\Microsoft.WebApplication.targets" />

After deleting this file, it works fine.

Answer 4

I got this after reinstalling Windows. Visual Studio was installed, and I could see the Silverlight project type in the New Project window, but opening one didn't work. The solution was simple: I had to install the Silverlight Developer runtime and/or the Microsoft Silverlight 4 Tools for Visual Studio. This may seem stupid, but I overlooked it because I thought it should work, as the Silverlight project type was available.

Answer 5

This link on MSDN also helps a lot to understand the reason why it doesn't work. $(MSBuildToolsPath) is the path to Microsoft.Build.Engine v3.5 (inserted automatically in a project file when you create in VS2008). If you try to build your project for .Net 2.0, be sure that you changed this path to $(MSBuildBinPath) which is the path to Microsoft.Build.Engine v2.0.

Answer 6

I ran into this issue while executing an Ansible playbook so I want to add my 2 cents here. I noticed a warning message about missing Visual Studio 14. Visual Studio version 14 was released in 2015 and the solution to my problem was installing Visual Studio 2015 Professional on the host machine of my Azure DevOps agent.