VS 2013 and MSBuild

Question

I've recently upgraded to Visual Studio 2013, which has caused back to back problems when building externally using MSBuild (API or Executable with command line args)

Issue #1 When building with MSBuild it doesn't generate Fake assemblies which are required for our Unit Tests, this leads to build failures. A simple build in visual studio fixes this temporarily, until a new fake assembly needs to be generated.

Issue #2 When running code analysis this complains with the following:

C:\Program Files (x86)\MSBuild\Microsoft\VisualStudio\v12.0\CodeAnalysis\Microsoft.CodeAnalysis.targets(284,5): 
error MSB4127: The "CodeAnalysis" task could not be instantiated from the assembly "C:\Program Files (x86)\MSBuild\Microsoft\VisualStudio\v12.0\CodeAnalysis\.\FxCopTask.dll". 

Please verify the task assembly has been built using the same version of the Microsoft.Build.Framework assembly as the one installed on your computer and that your host application is not missing a binding redirect for Microsoft.Build.Framework. Unable to cast object of type 'Microsoft.Build.Tasks.CodeAnalysis' to type 'Microsoft.Build.Framework.ITask'.

I only have Visual Studio 2013 installed on my machine, apparently installing an older version could fix the issue, but it's not something which I can do. (VS 2013 Ships with its own MSBuild 12.0 which is located in a different directory to the previous MSBuild).

I'm unsure why Visual Studio is behaving any differently to MSBuild, i'm simply pointing to the solution file like so...

msbuild.exe "path\solution.sln" /property:Configuration=Debug

Answer 1

So, Visual Studio 2013 comes with a new version of MSBuild i.e. MSBuild 12.0. Once installed, it changes the path so that the new version is used by default.

Looks like your solution compiles with visual studio 2012, you can either specify the full path to msbuild.exe such as

C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v4.0.30319\msbuild "path\solution.sln" /property:Configuration=Debug

or set the visual studio 2012 environment variables by running the following before executing msbuild

"%VS110COMNTOOLS%"\vsvars32.bat // VS2012 environment variables

EDIT: Using MSbuild 12.0 assemblies "C:\Program Files (x86)\MSBuild\12.0\Bin\" fixes the issue with the code Analysis bug.