Upgrading SharePoint 2010 solution to SharePoint 2013 in Visual Studio 2019 - Deployment Issue

Question

I have a SharePoint 2010 solution I need to upgrade to 2013 and deploy to a 2013 server. I've opened with Visual Studio 2019 and followed the prompts to upgrade the SharePoint projects. I've updated other references, and made sure the solution builds without errors.

However, when I try to deploy, I get this error:

Error occurred in deployment step 'Retract Solution': This required project property is not found or has a value of null or empty string: BasePackagePath

I created a test SharePoint 2013 solution and it deploys as expected. I also tried just publishing one of the upgraded SharePoint projects (this solution is not sandboxed), and publishing fails with a similar error:

Publish package failed due to the following error(s): This required project property is not found or has a value of null or empty string: BasePackagePath

It appears that when I publish or deploy, the .wsp files are not being created for the projects.

How can I figure out why the .wsp is not being created? Or why the solution won't deploy?

Answer 1

I believe I found the culprit (finally). In the .csproj file, the projects that won’t deploy have this:

<Import Project="$(MSBuildExtensionsPath32)\Microsoft\VisualStudio\v10.0\SharePointTools\Microsoft.VisualStudio.SharePoint.targets" Condition="false" />

The new project I created that will deploy has this:

  <Import Project="$(VSToolsPath)\SharePointTools\Microsoft.VisualStudio.SharePoint.targets" Condition="'$(VSToolsPath)' != ''" />

Changing the SharePoint targets from the project that will not deploy to the second Import statement allowed me to deploy the upgraded SharePoint project from Visual Studio.