Core: Make it more clear that users need to download the VS tooling installer for .NET Core in VS.

[JonDouglas]

I have a dotnet core 1.1 project that I recently wanted to test the first run experience with the dotnet core tooling. (i.e. reformatting a machine for this purpose).

One thing that I found very confusing for the 1.1 installer is the following:

On the main page https://www.microsoft.com/net/core you believe you are downloading only dotnet core 1.0. Since I had upgraded to 1.1, I went directly to the other download page:

https://www.microsoft.com/net/download/core

This now gives me two options: LTS and Current (Off-topic: Why is LTS the default here and not current?)

Now since I've installed the bits quite a few times on different machines, I thought I could just install the Windows x64 SDK installer. However after installing only that and trying to load a project, I will get an incompatible framework error on loading my project.

The imported project "C:\Program Files(x86)\MSBuild\Microsoft\VisualStudio\v14.0\DotNet\Microsoft.DotNet.Props" was not found.Confirm that the path in the <Import> declaration is correct, and that the file exist on disk.

This error doesn't really help me resolve the problem. It actually makes me go down the wrong path by searching on Stack Overflow/Forums/etc. However I then went back to the original page:

https://www.microsoft.com/net/core (Which has VS 2015 selected by default)

And it points to the correct tooling that I needed to install before installing the 1.1 runtime.

https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=827546

At this point I actually didn't know there was VS Tooling. I thought it was installed with the Windows SDK, but apparently you get 1.0 AND VS Tooling in this installer.

Because of this and myself skipping over the "Windows" guide to just get the 1.1 SDK, it wasn't obvious that I needed the VS tooling. However after installing the dotnet core VS tooling and then installing the 1.1 SDK, everything worked fine.

Proposal:

1) Add a note on the downloads page(https://www.microsoft.com/net/download/core) in which a pre-requisite to using dotnet core in Visual Studio is the dotnet core visual studio tooling.

2) Empower the error message above to let the user know that they might not have the dotnet core VS tooling installed even though they have dotnet core Windows SDK installed.

[Petermarcu]

@piotrpMSFT , Another ref count on updating the links to give MSBuild based tooling on the download links.

[Petermarcu]

@JonDouglas , BTW, you shouldn't have to install the VS installer to get a working .NET Core environment from the command line. There is a point in time problem of us having a project.json and csproj based. Very soon the MSBuild based one will take over and you should have all the right links.

There is also a discussion about current vs LTS being the default. There is tension both ways there and we're working through it.

[JonDouglas]

@Petermarcu Thanks for the comments. I do agree that this will all go away hopefully once the MSBuild push takes over. I figured I'd document it for the time being as it wasn't straight-forward for me!

[Petermarcu]

@JonDouglas , much appreciated!

[JonDouglas]

@Petermarcu

Referencing the Stack Overflow question:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/39020289/microsoft-dotnet-props-was-not-found/40955825#40955825

viewed 4253 times

There's been quite a bit of traffic here, might be worth revisiting this issue!

[icnocop]

Since Visual Studio 2017 has been released, https://www.microsoft.com/net/core has changed, probably adding more to the confusion if we're still using Visual Studio 2015. 😕

[richlander]

We're now encouraging VS 2015 users to move to VS 2017 and are now longer providing much information on 2015 on the core page. I know that this isn't super helpful/satisfying.

As a result, closing.