Task failed because "sgen.exe" was not found: solution

Task failed because “sgen.exe” was not found, or the correct Microsoft Windows SDK is not installed. The task is looking for “sgen.exe” in the “bin” subdirectory beneath the location specified in the InstallationFolder value of the registry key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v6.0A. You may be able to solve the problem by doing one of the following:  1) Install the Microsoft Windows SDK for Windows Server 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5.  2) Install Visual Studio 2008.  3) Manually set the above registry key to the correct location.  4) Pass the correct location into the “ToolPath” parameter of the task.

This is a f*ck-up of Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 when project has web references. It may or may not occur only when VS 2008 beta version was previously installed to the machine – or it may be related to creating .NET 2.0 project in VS 2008. Changing the registry key will not help nor will adding C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\SDK\v2.0\Bin\ to the path. I did not try other solutions.

This issue has been also brought up at http://danhounshell.com/blogs/dan/archive/2006/08/22/1140.aspx, http://dhvik.blogspot.com/2007/11/task-failed-because-was-not-found.html and elsewhere, but there was no working fix. However, I used FileMon to check what Visual Studio is looking for – and it appears that it will always look for that file at C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v3.5\, which is does not contain sgen.exe.

Just copy sgen.exe from C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\SDK\v2.0\Bin\ to C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v3.5\ and everything will now compile just fine. Here, to make your life easier, copy command:

copy /y “C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\SDK\v2.0\Bin\sgen.exe”  “C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v3.5\”

Good luck!