Issue with clickonce bootstrapper and msbuild

Question

I have a CruiseControl .NET build server running on Windows Server 2003, and I am trying to build and publish my ClickOnce application using msbuild.

Everything is w

Answer 1

Hi I know this answer its soooooo late but just in case

I had to add the Path prop to the task, with the Path where the bootstrapper its located, in my case I used Visual Studio 2015 so the Path is:

**Program Files(x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 14.0\SDK\Boostrapper**

MSBuild has a Task GenerateBootstrapper in my case

    <GenerateBootstrapper> 
       AplicationFile="$(AppName)"
       ApplicationName=..
       ApplicationUrl=..
       BootstrapperItems=..
       Culture=..
       ApplicationUrl=.. 
       Path="Program Files(x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 14.0\SDK\Boostrapper\"
    </GenerateBootstrapper>

with this the MSBuild is able to recognize and generate the file

Now i'm stucked with the .net 4 bootstrapper but guess is another story...

Answer 2

I added this line to script. It helped.

call "%VS120COMNTOOLS%vsvars32.bat"

Visual Studio 2013, SDK v8.1A.

Answer 3

Just struggled with this myself - I chose to commit the bootstrapper files to source control. It is possible to override the path to bootstrappers, just provide /p:GenerateBootstrapperSdkPath=.build\Bootstrapper

Then no need to modify registry - and the added benefit that the build is now self-contained.

Only "problem" is that I have to manually copy the Bootstrapper files into source control. In my case (VStudio2015), this meant copying the files from C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 14.0\SDK\Bootstrapper

Answer 4

You can also pass the location of the bootstrapper packages to the common Publish target like this:

<PropertyGroup>
     <BootstrapperSdkPath>C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v8.0A\Bootstrapper</BootstrapperSdkPath>
</PropertyGroup>

and then

<Target Name="Publish">
    <MSBuild Targets="publish" ... Properties="GenerateBootstrapperSdkPath=$(BootstrapperSdkPath); ..."/>
</Target>

Answer 5

I was able to fix this problem by pointing to MSBuild.exe from this location

C:\Program Files (x86)\MSBuild\12.0\Bin\MSBuild.exe

Previously I was pointing to

C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v4.0.30319\MSBuild.exe

Answer 6

I experienced this same error via my TeamCity build server. The cause in my case was that I was running an MSBuild task against my .sln file, with a 'MyProject:publish' target. In this case, the solution+projecth had been updated to target .NET v4.5, but the build server was still configured to use MSBuild Tools 4.0 and .NET v4.0.

Took me a little while to work out the inconsistency between working and non-working branch builds.