Gamemaker Build of WinJS Fails Without VS2012 Installed - Error Your App Was Launched During the Build Phase

  • Article

I've picked up a Surface 3 for my personal software dev. Developerwise, I've installed Visual Studio 2013 as well as GameMaker 1.3.1433 onto the machine. I develop a quick game to test Gamemaker and the game appears to work fine when I route it to Windows. But, here's the catch....

Run to Windows - OK
Run to Windows Phone - OK
Run to Windows 8 (Native) - OK
Run to Windows 8 (JavaScript) - FAIL

I receive the message below, which told me, well, nothing.

"Error: Your app was launched during the build phase" dialog displayed

Where to go?   Gamemaker puts a ton of good info into its debug output.  So reviewing the debug output shows the build process was looking for VS2012 MSBuild, not the VS2013 MSBuild. VS 2012 hasn't been installed on my box!

 Build started 11/3/2014 9:36:17 AM.
Project "C:\Users\Joe\AppData\Local\Temp\gm_ttt_90086\gm_ttt_3272\catchtheclown.jsproj" 
on node 1 (default targets).
C:\Users\Joe\AppData\Local\Temp\gm_ttt_90086\gm_ttt_3272\catchtheclown.jsproj(41,3): 
error MSB4019: The imported project "C:\Program Files (x86) \MSBuild\Microsoft\VisualStudio\v11.0\ Microsoft.VisualStudio..Default.props" 
was not found. Confirm that the path in the  declaration is correct, and that the file exists on disk.
Done Building Project "C:\Users\Joe\AppData\Local\Temp\gm_ttt_90086\gm_ttt_3272\catchtheclown.jsproj" 
(default targets) -- FAILED.

Once I figured out Gamemaker wants VS2012 for building a WinJS app, it was easily resolved by installing the free version of Visual Studio 2012 Express from https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=30664  . GameMaker is quite happy at that point, and I've got my WinJS build....