Windows Azure Development: The target “CoreCompile” does not exist in the project.

Recently I have looking into SharePoint integration with Windows Azure (I will post more about this project, when it works:-)), and I ran across some warnings when I was publishing a new MVC3 application to my Azure instance.

The warning I received was

“C:\Program Files (x86)\MSBuild\4.0\Microsoft.Common.targets\ImportAfter\Microsoft.VisualStudio.SharePoint.SandboxedCompilation.targets(47,5): warning MSB4057: The target “CoreCompile” does not exist in the project.”

As the publish was taking longer than expected and I had previously not had any warnings, I thought I would investigate.  It turns out that when I created my new MVC app I had forgotten to add the required references to the project to allow it to run in Azure.

I added the following references and marked them as “copy local”.

•Microsoft.Web.Infrastructure
•System.Web.Helpers
•System.Web.Mvc
•System.Web.Razor
•System.Web.WebPages
•System.Web.WebPages.Deployment
•System.Web.WebPages.Razor

Once I had added these everything deployed as expected.