Troubleshooting

Designite is designed to work on a development or build machine, i.e., it assumes that you can build your project on the same machine. Typically, Designite can successfully analyze a project if you have an appropriate version of Visual Studio installed corresponding to the program you are trying to analyze. However, installing Designite on a non-development machine may not be successful due to missing configuration settings. These configuration issues arise when either Designite (and its underlying libraries) cannot locate MSBuild.exe or the required SDKs. Such a situation is quite common when a researcher or a quality enthusiast wants to analyze several projects (often open-source) using Designite. You may use the following suggestions to avoid such configuration issues.

One potential error that you see in the log file generated by Designite corresponds to missing correct version of MSBuild.

The selected project <path of the project> could not be analyzed.
The tools version "15.0" is unrecognized. Available tools versions are "2.0", "3.5", "4.0".

If you see the above error, you must install the correct version of Visual Studio (which will also install MSBuild) to fix this problem. If the problem persists, it is because Roslyn (the underlying framework upon which Designite is built) could not locate an appropriate version of MSBuild.exe. You may create an environment variable MSBUILD_EXE_PATH and specify an appropriate path (for example C:Program Files (x86)Microsoft Visual Studio2017EnterpriseMSBuild15.0BinMSBuild.exe).

You may also see some variant of the following error message:

An imported component of the selected project was not found and thus the project could not be analyzed.
The imported project "C:\Program Files (x86)\Designite\Designite\Sdks\Microsoft.NET.Sdk\Sdk\Sdk.props" was not found.

The error occurs due to either missing project dependencies (for example, missing SDK) or missing environment settings (and not due to a missing folder in the Designite installation). The solution of this problem is to set environment variables correctly. Specifically, create user environment variable MSBuildSDKsPath and set its value to something similar to C:Program Filesdotnetsdk2.1.2Sdks. If you have Sdk=”Microsoft.NET.Sdk” in your .csproj, then a folder with the same name must exist at your MSBuildSDKsPath path.

Tip

Installing Visual Studio Build Tools and .NET SDK (for example, 6.0) helps ensure the required SDK is on the machine.