allowDefinition='MachineToApplication' msbuild error

Question

We have a ASP.NET MVC with 4-5 different build configurations. Whenever we change the build configuration, we need to delete the obj folder for the web project, since we get

Answer 1

I don't know that there is an "official" fix as it just seemed to start on multiple projects of mine for no reason that I can find in Visual Studio Premium 2012 (never happened in previous versions of VS).

As a work around to automate the deletion of the obj directory as others have said, similar to an answer by user Casual in this post VisualStudio: How to save the obj folder somewhere else, where unfortunately just moving the location of the obj folder didn't always seem to work.

Instead I added a few commands under Build Events in the Pre-build event command line:

rd "$(ProjectDir)obj" /S /Q
md "$(ProjectDir)obj"
md "$(ProjectDir)obj\Debug"
md "$(ProjectDir)obj\Release"

You can change/add/remove subfolders to match your custom build configurations using the line where buildConfigName matches the name of the build configuration you are using:

md "$(ProjectDir)obj\buildConfigName"

Hope this helps!

Answer 2

tip 1: clean & then rebuild.

tip 2: just close VS and open again.

tip 3: the downloaded project may be inside another sub folder... open the folder which has you .net files.

c:/demo1/demo/ (all files)

You should have to open demo from vs... not demo1.

Answer 3

I have a somewhat a similar problem, i had the main config as Copy Always so it copied the config to the bin directory. When i republished the main project, i got the MachineToApplication error. So my solution was to just change the config to Do Not Copy and remove the extra configuration in the bin folder.

Answer 4

I had the same error but with a deployed page.. Then realized my webserver's clock was set back to 2010 for some reason. set it to the correct date fix my problem

Answer 5

Clean your project Remove the /obj folder (probably using publish and deploy? - there is a bug in it)

Answer 6

Cleaning the solution (Right click Solution in VS, clean), worked for me.