I've recently been getting ready for product launch, including setting up automated deployment into our development environments. Because of a restriction on the unit tests in the project, we cannot use the hosted build agents available with Visual Studio Online. We have to host our own server and install the build agent there.
After following the instructions here Deploy an Agent on Windows, I found that the agent was responding to builds that were queued thru visual studio online. However, since my solution contained PCL projects, I was getting the following error:
Error MSB4019: The imported project "C:\Program Files (x86)\MSBuild\Microsoft\Portable\v4.5\Microsoft.Portable.CSharp.targets" was not found. Confirm that the path in the declaration is correct, and that the file exists on disk.
Googling did not reveal much information, but I eventually stumbled upon this blog post which indicated the need for PortableLibraryTools. Even today, after installing the MS Build Tools 2015, the targets were not available. Installing this with the /buildmachine switch removed the above errors.
