*.dll.licenses file in obj directory not created with msbuild in TeamCity

Question

I am working on upgrading our TeamCity projects from VS2012 to VS2015 and I am running into an issue compiling our MVC application.

Old MSBuild (v4.0.30319.34209) g

Answer 1

We had the same problem when building with VisualBuild. I found a solution without installing the Win10 SDK:

In the projects properties Compile Settings we added a "Pre-build Event Command Line" like this:

pushd "%VS120COMNTOOLS%..\..\VC"
call vcvarsall.bat
popd
pushd $(ProjectDir)\"My Project"
lc /target:$(TargetFileName) /complist:licenses.licx /outdir:"..\obj\$(ConfigurationName)"
popd
popd

This command uses the (older) VS12 Tools and starts the lc compiler tool manually prior to the build of the project and compiles the licenses.licx file into the *.licenses resource file

Answer 2

The answer "Install the Windows 10 SDK" is correct - basically. But there is an additional pitfall: There is more then one version existing of this SDKs: https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/downloads/sdk-archive

By the writing of this comment:

• July 2015 (Version 10.0.26624.0) contains .NET Framework 4.6 SDK
• Nov. 2015 (Version 10.0.10586.212) contains .NET Framework 4.6.1 SDK
• Aug. 2016 (Version 10.0.14393.0) contains .NET Framework 4.6.2 SDK

Check your VS 2015 output and what version of LC.exe is called. Then install the appropriate SDK on the build server. Don't forget to install Microsoft Build Tools 2015 too.

Note: My build is targeting .net 4.5, but above is needed to build on TeamCity with 2015 tools.

Answer 3

Could be helpful for someone:

After installing the Windows 10 SDK and rebooting my server, I've added /p:VisualStudioVersion=14.0 /p:TargetFrameworkVersion=v4.5.2 to my msbuild.exe. That solved it in my case.

Answer 4

In our case we use Atlassian Bamboo as build server with build agents running Windows Server 2012 (not R2). So installing the Windows 10 SDK or Visual Studio Build Tools 2017 or 2019 was not an option because it won't install on Windows Server 2012 because it does not meet system requirements.

I got it working with a pre-build event added to the VS project. (Thanks Joseph Haslinger for the idea)

The pre-build event added to the project properties calls a PowerShell script with the following command: powershell.exe -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -NoProfile -NonInteractive -File $(ProjectDir)pre-build.ps1 $(ProjectDir) $(TargetFileName)

The command is based on the one from Jiří Činčura of tabs ↹ over ␣ ␣ ␣ spaces

I’m setting ExecutionPolicy to Bypass in case somebody would not have it set to Unrestricted.

Answer 5

I'm using Atlassian Bamboo as our build server but otherwise had exactly the same problem described here. I tried every solution in this thread but couldn't get anything to work. In the end, I used the new version of MSBuild that comes with Visual Studio 2017 and suddenly my licence dll was created correctly. In my case, the MSBuild.exe can be found at:

C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2017\BuildTools\MSBuild\15.0\Bin\MSBuild.exe

Answer 6

This is a closely related but slightly different situation in that I am using Jenkins to control the build...

I had to make several changes.

1. Installed Windows 10 SDK on the build server. In my case, installing the SDK "revealed" the underlying error which is that MSBuild was not generating the *.dll.licenses file.
2. Added /tv:14.0 ( /ToolsVersion:14.0 ) to my build parameters.

/p:Configuration=Release /p:VisualStudioVersion=14.0 /tv:14.0 /verbosity:Normal

3. Created the license file manually as a step prior to executing the MSBuild step. The following command creates the file "myproject.dll.licenses".

cd "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v10.0A\bin\NETFX 4.6.2 Tools"

.\lc.exe /target:MyProject.dll /complist:"C:\Program Files (x86)\Jenkins\jobs\MyProject\workspace\MyProject\licenses.licx" /i:"C:\Program Files\nsoftware\E-Payment Integrator V6 .NET Edition\lib\nsoftware.InPayWeb.dll" /outdir:"C:\Program Files (x86)\Jenkins\jobs\MyProject\workspace\MyProject\obj\Release"