MS Build – “Microsoft.WebApplication.targets” was not found.
.NET July 22nd, 2008This is a stupid error, an oversight by Microsoft. As far as I can tell, you can ONLY install the Web Application pack for vs2005 if you have VS installed – you cant install it on a build server, which is nice and “fun”.
A solution is to just create the directory structure it asks for -
C:\Program Files\MSBuild\Microsoft\VisualStudio\v8.0\WebApplications\
And copy over the files from your own copy. I don’t know why Microsoft did it this way, but its criminally retarded.
Edit – You can now download the file from here.


February 24th, 2010 at 1:05 am
[...] What the hell happened there? Well in the infinate wisdom of Microsoft (which I have blogged about before), they did not decide to include the Microsoft.WebApplications.targets file anywhere to be found on [...]
May 16th, 2010 at 5:16 am
Astonishingly, this is still a problem in VS2010. Just experienced it trying to build an MVC2 project on a 2k8 server.