Cannot build Windows Azure Cloud project in VS 2010 after installing VS 2012 side by side

Question

According to Microsoft the side-by-side installation of Visual Studio 2010 and 2012 is supported (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms246609.aspx).

I already had VS 2010 installed on my system (Windows 7 box) along with the Windows Azure Tools 1.5. I used this configuration to create a cloud project that is hosted on Azure. A few days ago I decided to also put VS 2012 on my system but to do it in a side-by-side manner rather than upgrading (or uninstalling) the VS 2010. The reason why I did not want to uninstall VS 2010 was that I already had some add-ons configured for it for script and css minification and aggregation. I heard that VS 2012 has this functionality built-in but I did not want to touch the dozens of scripts that I had already created using the older method. So I wanted to keep my VS 2010 environment in a pristine, working state in case there was an emergency and I had to publish a patch for my already hosted application. I would use VS 2012 for all the new projects going forward.

However, after I put VS 2012 on my box it also brought down 1.8 version of Azure SDK. As a result, I can no longer successfully build my VS 2010 solution. I have one worker role and one web role in that solution. If I build each one of them individually the builds succeed. But if I then try to build the entire solution or package it, it fails with no message in the log whatsoever. It just shows "Build Failed" in the VS status bar.

Since I was not getting any error in the status bar, I decided to create a "Hello World" application from scratch with only one web role using Windows Azure Cloud project template in VS 2010 hoping to get a better error message. Indeed, when I try to build the entire solution I get an error:

Error 102 WAT080 : Failed to locate the Windows Azure SDK. Please make sure the Windows Azure SDK v1.5 is installed. C:\Program Files (x86)\MSBuild\Microsoft\VisualStudio\v10.0\Windows Azure Tools\1.5\Microsoft.WindowsAzure.targets

Clearly the installation of VS 2012 and Azure SDK 1.8 corrupted the older version. Ideally I would like to keep VS 2010 + Azure SDK 1.5 truly side-by-side with VS 2012 + Azure SDK 1.8. Is there a way to do this? If not, then how can I fix the error above? In other words, how can I fix VS 2010 to work with Azure SDK 1.8?

All you help is greatly appreciated.

Regards, Archil

Answer 1

I solved this by going to Microsoft site and installing Windows Azure SDK for .NET - October 2012 (1.8).

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=35448

Initially I was a bit afraid and people were saying that it would not work and they encouraged to do a manual one-by-one install. However, I decided to use the Web Platform Installed link from the above page:

http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=254269

All in all, things went smoothly.