Build SSRS *.rptproj w/ VS 2019 Build Tools

Question

Build SSRS *.rptproj w/ VS 2019 Build Tools

Mark Weber 6

How do you get reporting projects to build on a server that only has VS2019 Build Tools installed?

My build fails with the following error. There is no "Reporting Services" sub folder under MSBuild on our build server:

error MSB4226: The imported project "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2019\BuildTools\MSBuild\Reporting Services\Microsoft.ReportingServices.MSBuilder.targets" was not found. Also, tried to find "Reporting Services\Microsoft.ReportingServices.MSBuilder.targets" in the fallback search path(s) for $(MSBuildExtensionsPath) - "C:\Program Files (x86)\MSBuild". These search paths are defined in "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2019\BuildTools\MSBuild\Current\Bin\MSBuild.exe.Config". Confirm that the path in the <Import> declaration is correct, and that the file exists on disk in one of the search paths. 
```Is the only option to separately install reporting services projects from the marketplace: [https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=ProBITools.MicrosoftReportProjectsforVisualStudio]()? The preference is to only have VS Build Tools installed on our build server so a Nuget package or including the required components for SSRS with the VS Build Tools would be ideal.

1 answer

Your answer

Answer 1

Dylan Zhu-MSFT 6,431

Hi MarkWeber,

You can copy the whole Reporting Services folder from

(one machine with VS and extension) C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2019\Community\MSBuild\

to

(build server) C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2019\BuildTools\MSBuild\

Best Regards,
Dylan

If the answer is helpful, please click "Accept Answer" and upvote it.
Note: Please follow the steps in our **documentation to enable e-mail notifications if you want to receive the related email notification for this thread.**

Zarate, Martin 15 Reputation points

2023-09-28T00:31:45.7766667+00:00

So like, you expect us to do this to each individual build server in the farm and document that this was done how? Why isn't this a VS Installer workflow so I can easily include it in our build-server configuration scripts?
Nathan Phillip Brink (binki) 26 Reputation points

2026-01-18T23:09:27.84+00:00
This seems like a wrong solution. But you can kind of do it more properly. The .vsix file is some sort of archive format (according to file it is a ZIP archive) which the tar utility shipped with Windows recognizes. So you can directly fetch the .vsix and do something like the following:

curl --no-progress-meter -Lfo "%USERPROFILE%\Downloads\reportprojects-4.0.0.vsix" https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/_apis/public/gallery/publishers/ProBITools/vsextensions/MicrosoftReportProjectsforVisualStudio2022/4.0.0/vspackageMD "%USERPROFILE%\Downloads\reportprojects-4.0.0"tar -C "%USERPROFILE%\Downloads\reportprojects-4.0.0" -xf "%USERPROFILE%\Downloads\reportprojects-4.0.0.vsix" $MSBuildMD "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio\2022\Community\MSBuild\Reporting Services"COPY "%USERPROFILE%\Downloads\reportprojects-4.0.0\$MSBuild\Reporting%20Services"\*.* "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio\2022\Community\MSBuild\Reporting Services\"

(Note, if this is inside of a script file, you will need to write Reporting%%20Services—or, on AppVeyor, Reporting%%%%20Services—instead of Reporting%20Services because CMD handles this differently in a batch file versus interactively).

This is way faster than using VSIXInstaller to install the .vsix file (that takes me consistently 3m40s on the environment I was working with).

Share via

Build SSRS *.rptproj w/ VS 2019 Build Tools

1 answer

Your answer