Problem when upgrading Visual Studio 2010 Web Project to Visual Studio 2013

With the recent release of Visual Studio 2013, I decided to try and start upgrading some of my Visual Studio 2010 projects over to Visual Studio 2013.

I opened up a reasonably large solution that contained several different types of C# projects and the overall solution seemed to upgrade just fine.

However, when I built/re-built my solution, I noticed a very puzzling error message:

After doing a bit of searching, I came across this article:  http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4681248/the-target-copybindeployableassemblies-does-not-exist-in-the-project

Well, it seemed to address the problem indirectly in a number of ways, but copying and pasting the code exactly as it appeared in the article did not seem to work for me!  However, the solution seemed correct nevertheless, so I tried a variation after more closely examining the MSBuild script since I knew that MSBuild 12.0 (which ships with Visual Studio 2013) changed various properties in MSBuild and that could be contributing to the continued error message.  In addition, I knew that the Publishing model changed from Visual Studio 2010 to Visual Studio 2013, so I removed both of the Microsoft.Web.Publishing elements.

Therefore, this was the final result of my Visual Studio 2013 change:

 

<Import Project="$(VSToolsPath)\WebApplications\Microsoft.WebApplication.targets" Condition="'$(VSToolsPath)' != ''" />
<Import Project="$(MSBuildExtensionsPath32)\Microsoft\VisualStudio\v10.0\WebApplications\Microsoft.WebApplication.targets" Condition="false" />

If you think you might still require preservation of the Microsoft.Web.Publishing.targets, you can alternatively simply enter an empty _CopyBinDeployableAssemblies target into your Visual Studio project file.  As it turns out, that also works!

I included the line just before the BeforeBuild event.  My resultant Visual Studio 2013 project file looked like this:

<PropertyGroup>
  <VisualStudioVersion Condition="'$(VisualStudioVersion)' == ''">10.0</VisualStudioVersion>
  <VSToolsPath Condition="'$(VSToolsPath)' == ''">$(MSBuildExtensionsPath32)\Microsoft\VisualStudio\v$(VisualStudioVersion)</VSToolsPath>
</PropertyGroup>
<Import Project="$(MSBuildBinPath)\Microsoft.CSharp.targets" />
<Import Project="$(VSToolsPath)\Web\Microsoft.Web.Publishing.targets" Condition="'$(VSToolsPath)' != ''" />
<Import Project="$(MSBuildExtensionsPath32)\Microsoft\VisualStudio\v10.0\Web\Microsoft.Web.Publishing.targets" Condition="false" />
<Target Name="_CopyBinDeployableAssemblies"></Target> 
<!-- To modify your build process, add your task inside one of the targets below and uncomment it. 
     Other similar extension points exist, see Microsoft.Common.targets.
<Target Name="BeforeBuild">
</Target>
<Target Name="AfterBuild">
</Target>
-->