Question

I’m trying to build some code but getting lots of warnings in target files, stuff like this:

Warning 12  The element 'ItemGroup' in namespace 'http://schemas.microsoft.com/developer/msbuild/2003' 
has invalid child element 'TCS_Compile' in namespace 'http://schemas.microsoft.com/developer/msbuild/2003'. 
List of possible elements expected: 
'Item, Reference, COMReference, COMFileReference, Xdcmake, Bscmake, ClCompile,
 ClInclude, Midl, ResourceCompile, PreLinkEvent, CustomBuildStep, Manifest, 
ProjectConfiguration, NativeReference, ProjectReference, Compile, EmbeddedResource, 
Content, Page, Resource, ApplicationDefinition, None, BaseApplicationManifest, 
Folder, Import, Service, WebReferences, WebReferenceUrl, FileAssociation, 
BootstrapperFile, PublishFile, CodeAnalysisDependentAssemblyPaths, 
CodeAnalysisDictionary, CodeAnalysisImport, Link, ResourceCompile, PreBuildEvent, 
PostBuildEvent' 
in namespace 'http://schemas.microsoft.com/developer/msbuild/2003'.

Any ideas how I could fix these?

Answer 1

Info from [dead link]…

You can safely ignore this warning. So does MSBuild validate your
project files against the schema? Yes it does, but I wasn’t sure just
how it was accomplished, so I fired off an email to Buck Hodges. He
was nice enough to pass it by an as-yet-unnamed-dev on the MSBuild
team. The dev stated that

“…MSBuild does try to validate against the schema. However, the validation is done at runtime by our code rather than loading the
[project] file using a validate reader with the xsd (mainly for perf
reasons). MSBuild should fail any projects which don’t adhere to the
schema.”

So there you have it. The schema is enforced while still allowing you
to customize and extend the MSBuild project file to fit your needs.