The builds tools for v120 (Platform Toolset = 'v120') cannot be found

Question

Using visual studio 2012 on windows 8 x64 aparantly this is caused by msbuild being moved into .net but I havn\'t seen how to fix it yet.

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Answer 1

In VS 2012, I was getting "SMB2 will not build: Error 1 error MSB8020: The builds tools for Visual Studio 2010 (Platform Toolset = 'v100') cannot be found. To build using the v100 build tools, either click the Project menu or right-click the solution, and then select "Update VC++ Projects...". Install Visual Studio 2010 to build using the Visual Studio 2010 build tools."

Throwing caution to the wind, I tried the suggestion: Selected the Solution in Solution Explorer, then clicked in the "Update VC++" menu item. This did some updateing and then started a build which succeeded.

The "Update VC++" menu item no longer appears in the solution menu.

Answer 2

I was facing same issue while building some of project.

I used Visual Studio 2015 IDE, there it was working fine but while giving build from PowerShell script, it was giving toolset related "The builds tools for v140 (Platform Toolset = 'v140') cannot be found." error

So eventually it was issue of pointing to incorrect MSBUILD exe for the respective project.

Earlier I was pointing to $MSBUILD="C:\windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v4.0.30319\MSBuild.exe

And build was successful when I updated script to point to $MSBUILD="C:\Program Files (x86)\MSBuild\14.0\Bin\MSBuild.exe"

Hence to resolve the issue, please make sure to use correct MSBUILD.

Answer 3

If you have VS2013 installed and are getting this error, you may be invoking the wrong MSBuild. With VS2013, Microsoft now includes MSBuild as part of Visual Studio. See this Visual Studio blog posting for details.

In particular, note the new location of the binaries:

On 32-bit machines they can be found in: C:\Program Files\MSBuild\12.0\bin

On 64-bit machines the 32-bit tools will be under: C:\Program Files (x86)\MSBuild\12.0\bin

and the 64-bit tools under: C:\Program Files (x86)\MSBuild\12.0\bin\amd64

The MSBuild in %WINDIR%\Microsoft.NET\Framework\ doesn't seem to recognize the VS2013 (v120) platform toolset.

Answer 4

When a VS2013 C++ project is opened in VS2015, and there are warnings about "The build tools for v120... cannot be found", I simply need to edit the .vcxproj file and change <PlatformToolset>v120</PlatformToolset> to <PlatformToolset>v140</PlatformToolset>, and close and re-open the solution.