VSIX Project (Community) - build errors on empty project error MSB4801 error CS0246

[cjdutoit]

Hi all,

I am on the latest version of VS2022 (17.4.3) and are currently seeing build errors on GitHub on a brand new VSIX project without any code in it.

Building the project within Visual Studio is fine, but doing a build on GitHub for PR's fails. I can replicate this locally by running dotnet build on the command line.

I get the following error on a few files:
.nuget\packages\microsoft.vssdk.buildtools\17.0.5232\build\Microsoft.VSSDK.BuildTools.targets(16,5): error MSB4801: The task factory "CodeTaskFactory" is not supported on the .NET Core version of MSBuild. [C:\repos\VSIXProject3\VSIXProject3\VSIXProject3.csproj]

.nuget\packages\community.visualstudio.toolkit.17\17.0.430\build\imports\NewtonsoftJsonVersionCheck.targets(38,5): warning CVSTBLD002: The version of Newtonsoft.Json cannot be greater than 13.0.1, but version is currently being used. [C:\repos\VSIXProject3\VSIXProject3\VSIXProject3.csproj]

I then tried the non-community VSIX projects and seems to be getting errors there as well on the same files although the error code is now different

error CS0246: The type or namespace name 'UseManagedResourcesOnly' could not be found (are you missing a using directive or an assembly reference?) [C:\repos\VSIXProject1\VSIXProject1\VSIXProject1\VSIXProject1.csproj]

Have any of you seen? Any suggestions on a fix?

Thanks
Chris

[reduckted]

Unfortunately you cannot (currently) use the .NET CLI to compile a Visual Studio extension.

https://developercommunity.visualstudio.com/t/VSIX-project-with-SDK-style-csproj/1572145

Thankfully it appears to be in progress (see this comment on that ticket and the What's Next section in the blog post about VS 17.4). So hopefully in 17.5 we'll be able to use the .NET CLI 🤞

In the meantime, you can still build the extension in a GitHub action, but you have to use MSBuild to do it via the microsoft/setup-msbuild action. Here's an example:
https://github.com/reduckted/ProjectFilter/blob/19950f9ab2add92964a83a2052b29a9852be4bad/.github/workflows/ci.yml#L16-L33

[cjdutoit]

@reduckted Thanks for the feedback and the pointer to use msbuild. I will update my GitHub action. Appreciate your help.