I recently needed to build just one project (and its dependencies) from a solution. I quickly found the following MSDN article on exactly how to do this:

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms171486.aspx

However, I couldn’t get it to work for the life of me. The command always complained along the lines of:

MySolution.sln.metaproj : error MSB4057: The target "My.Project:Clean" does not exist in the project. [MySolution.sln]

Luckily during a search on the internet about troubleshooting MSBuild issues, I came across a way to save the intermediate project file created by MSBuild from the solution. Because as you might have noticed when you look at a .sln file, its not even close to a regular MSBuild project file. MSBuild interprets the solution file and generates one big MSBuild project file from it, then builds that file.

This can be done by setting an environment variable before calling the MSBuild for a solution. In a command prompt type the following:

Set MSBuildEmitSolution=1

When you then for instance build a solution with the following command:

msbuild MySolution.sln /t:Clean

This will perform a clean of the solution, but also save the entire MSBuild project file in a file called MySolution.sln.metaproj.

I thought this was a good idea because the MSDN article above talks about targets, and usually targets in a project file are called Clean, or Rebuild or something like that. Why would there be a target “MyProjectName:Clean”? Well, because MSBuild generate that target in the aforementioned .metaproj file.

It turns out however that target names may not contain the . character. And MSBuild nicely works around this by replacing them with _ characters. So to get my single project building I had to call:

msbuild MySolution.sln /t:My_Project:Rebuild

Hopefully this post saves someone else some time.