Project builds but can't publish

Question

I have an MVC project that for an uknown reason refuses to publish to a local folder in the PC.

The log says the following:

3>------ Publish start         


        

Answer 1

Try opening the solution with Visual Studio 2017

I had been building and publishing from Visual Studio 2015, as that is the version of Visual Studio that the Version Selector picked when I opened the solution file.

I tried opening my solution file from Visual Studio 2017 instead, and that succeeded in publishing.