I have an older version of Visual Studio 2022 that came out with .NET 7. Due to system requirements reasons I cannot upgrade the Visual Studio 2022 to the most recent version that supports .NET 8.

I thus installed only the .NET 8 SDK and was hoping to use the ‘msbuild’ that comes with the older version of Visual Studio 2022 (.NET 7 – 17.6.5) to build my project targeting .NET 8.

Unfortunately when I run the msbuild command:

"C:Program FilesMicrosoft Visual Studio2022CommunityMSBuildCurrentBinMSBuild.exe" "C:UsersJohnDesktopTempBlazorApp1BlazorApp1.sln" /property:Configuration=Debug

I get the following error:

error NETSDK1045: The current .NET SDK does not support targeting .NET 8.0. Either target .NET 7.0 or lower, or use a version of the .NET SDK that supports .NET 8.0

However, when I list my SDK using dotnet --list-sdks I get:

2.1.4 [C:Program Filesdotnetsdk]
2.1.202 [C:Program Filesdotnetsdk]
2.1.401 [C:Program Filesdotnetsdk]
7.0.306 [C:Program Filesdotnetsdk]
8.0.302 [C:Program Filesdotnetsdk]

Why does msbuild not see the installed sdk for .NET 8? Is it because it’s the msbuild that comes with Visual Studio 2022 for .NET 7? I know I could get the project to build using dotnet and adding a global.json file but unfortunately I can’t use the dotnet command, and must get msbuild to build the project.