[wallyhs]

FWIW, you can install MSBuild without Visual Studio. It's part of the Windows SDK. If your target system is not supported, you have to run it on a supported system and choose the "Download for installation on a separate computer" option. Then copy the resulting msi and cab files to the server and run them. See http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12944502/build-asp-net-4-...

However, after I did this, I had to find build targets that Visual Studio installed and copy them from my workstation into the same directory on the server (i.e. C:\Program Files (x86)\MSBuild\Microsoft\VisualStudio\v11.0\WebApplications).

[radicalbyte]

Yup, that's how I make a build server: clean windows image, MSBuild, then copy the utils, build targets, reference assemblies etc over from a machine containing VS.

It's such a pain that a famous ex-Microsoftie started a connect request for it:

https://visualstudio.uservoice.com/forums/121579-visual-stud...

[vpeters25]

This works fine until you have to build a project with a 3rd party commercial library requiring licenses (.licx files). I just spent a week trying to put together a vagrant vm to build such a project finally giving up and adding visual studio to its provisioning script.