VSO MSBuild: The given path's format is not supported

Question

I am trying to setup CI on a solution containing 60 projects. I keep getting the following error message on only four of them:

2018-04-17T18:55:08.4252401Z GenerateMsdeployManifestFiles:

2018-04-17T18:55:08.4252401Z Generate source manifest file for Web Deploy package/publish ...

2018-04-17T18:55:08.4282049Z ##[error]C:\\Program Files (x86)\\Microsoft Visual Studio\\2017\\Community\\MSBuild\\Microsoft\\VisualStudio\\v15.0\\Web\\Microsoft.Web.Publishing\\ImportAfter\\Microsoft.Web.Publishing.targets(3507,5): Error : The given path's format is not supported.

2018-04-17T18:55:08.4282049ZC:\\Program Files (x86)\\Microsoft Visual Studio\\2017\\Community\\MSBuild\\Microsoft\\VisualStudio\\v15.0\\Web\\Microsoft.Web.Publishing\\ImportAfter\\Microsoft.Web.Publishing.targets(3507,5): error : The given path's format is not supported. [D:_Work\\7\\s\\src\\Feature\\Code[Repo]\\MyProject.csproj]

2018-04-17T18:55:08.4411480Z Done Building Project "D:_Work\\7\\s\\src\\Feature\\Code[Repo]\\MyProject.csproj" (default targets) -- FAILED.

Line 3507 in the Microsoft.Web.Publishing.targets file is this:

 <ExportManifestFile Manifests="@(MsDeploySourceManifest)" ManifestFile="$(PackageSourceManifest)" /> 

The odd thing is this issue is only happening for some projects, not all. I tried to compare them but I didn't see anything obvious.

We are able to build the full solution on our local environments using visual studio. I have also installed visual studio on the CI server and was able to build the solution there as well.

Answer 1

I was able to solve the issue. I went through the installed programs on the CI server and saw that visual studio 2015 and 2017 were both installed. I uninstalled both of them and reinstalled VS2017 - it is now building successfully.