Microsoft.Expression.Blend.Silverlight.targets was not found
Posted by Andrew Myhre on July 29, 2009
Recently I encountered the following error when trying to open a Silverlight 3 project:
Unable to read the project file ‘X.csproj’.
The imported project “c:\program files\MSBuild\Microsoft\Expression\Blend\3.0\Silverlight\Microsoft.Expression.Blend.Silverlight.targets” was not found.
Confirm the path in the <Import> declaration is correct, and that the file exists on disk.
The scenario is that I had fired up the new RC of Expression Blend 3.0 and created a Silverlight 3 project. At some point along the way I had also been messing with a TextBlock and I had ticked the ‘Embed’ checkbox to embed the font I selected into the project. Then when I tried to open the project on another machine I was met with the above error and my Silverlight project wouldn’t load.
Unni Ravindranathan was helpful enough to point out that when using Blend 3 features such as embedded fonts you must have the Blend 3.0 SDK installed, and sure enough that’s exactly what I’d done. I had thought I needed to installed Expression Blend 3.0 on my machine in order to open the project, but the SDK was all I needed. Unni is Program Manager on the Expression Blend team and I appreciate his quick and direct help.
I’d like to know why I could always embed fonts in Silverlight projects without needing Blend 3.0 but I’m sure there’s a perfectly reasonable explanation. Not to mention – why is the SDK not an optional part of the Silverlight 3 SDK install? It’s only a 3mb download…
Grab the SDK here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=F1AE9A30-4928-411D-970B-E682AB179E17&displaylang=en
