Visual Studio 2022 not listed in devops build solution pipeline task

The trick is to use a MSBUILD task and switch from Version to Specify Location and insert the path to the msbuild.exe of VS2022 e.g. C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2022\BuildTools\MSBuild\Current\Bin\msbuild.exe.

EDIT:

Another way is to use a Command line task and call the executable directly. If you need the complete VS development environment to build your application, than specify the path of the executable in the Tool field for example as "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio\2022\Professional\Common7\IDE\devenv.com" and specify the solution and configuration in the Arguments field for example as "MySolution.sln /build "Release|Any CPU".

Look at the screenshot below:

Please make sure your path is correct in the MSBuild.exe task

You can build Microsoft's task yourself and push these tasks directly into your project collection using tfx-cli. You can also create an extension containing these updates tasks and install that into your collection.

To build the tasks you can run this script in PowerShell 7:

$tasksToBuild = @("VSBuildV1", "VsTestV1", "VsTestV2", "VsTestPlatformToolInstallerV1", 
                  "MSBuildV1", "DotNetCoreInstallerV1", "DotNetCoreCLIV2")

$outputDir = md _build -force

$extensionManifest = gc "vss-extension.json" | ConvertFrom-Json
$extensionManifest.contributions = @()

& git clone https://github.com/microsoft/azure-pipelines-tasks.git --quiet
cd azure-pipelines-tasks

& git config --local pager.branch false
$branches = & git branch -r
$version = (($branches | Select-String -pattern "(?<=origin/releases/m)\d+$").Matches) | %{ [int32]$_.Value } | measure-object -maximum
$version = $version.Maximum

& git reset --hard origin/releases/m$version

npm install

Write-Host "Building tasks..."
foreach ($task in $tasksToBuild)
{
    Write-Host "Building $task..."
    & node make.js build --task $task
    Write-Host "Building $task done."
    
    $taskDir = "$outputDir/$task"
    copy "./_build/Tasks/$task" $taskDir -Recurse

    Write-Host "Updating contributions..."
    $extensionManifest.contributions += @{
        "id" = "$task"
        "type" = "ms.vss-distributed-task.task"
        "targets" = @("ms.vss-distributed-task.tasks")
        "properties" = @{
            "name" = "_build/$task"
        }
    }
}

cd ..

$extensionManifest.version = "1.$version.0"
$extensionManifest | ConvertTo-Json -depth 100 | Out-File "vss-extension.json" -Encoding utf8NoBOM

& npm install tfx-cli -g
& tfx extension create --manifests vss-extension.dev.json vss-extension.json --output tasks.vsix

From:

• https://github.com/jessehouwing/azure-pipelines-pre-and-post-tasks/blob/main/build.ps1

Make sure you have an extension manifest available in the folder when you run this script. You can look at this repo for an example:

• https://github.com/jessehouwing/azure-pipelines-pre-and-post-tasks

Replace the contents of build.ps1 with the script above, update the vss-extension.*.json files with your own publisher and extensionid and it should spit out an extension for you.

That way you'll get a copy of the exact tasks Microsoft published in the latest release of Azure DevOps (cloud).

I've documented these steps along with a few more options on my blog.

I've switch to a straight out MSBUILD task instead of a solution task, solves the problem for me :)

Edit PathFunctions.ps1 file located at ..\agent\_work\_tasks\VSBuild_71a9a2d3-a98a-4caa-96ab-affca411ecda\1.166.2\ps_modules\MSBuildHelpers\ replace $($MajorVersion+1).0) by $($MajorVersion+2).0) in lines 199 and 218.

Switching to the MSBuild task did not solve it for me, but what did work was changing the Pipeline Agent Specification from windows-2019 to windows-latest or windows-2022. This caused it to start using the windows-2022 VM image which apparently includes Visual Studio 2022, but windows-2019 only had VS 2019.

Note that the C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio\2022\Professional\MSBuild\Current\Bin\MSBuild.exe path also does not work anymore, because it's using the new Rosyln C# compiler at:

C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio\2022\Enterprise\MSBuild\Current\Bin\Roslyn\csc.exe

One other required change was to update the NuGet package restore to the latest version.