I ran into an issue with a new Azure Function I created: when I tried to run it, I got an error message about a RunResolvePublishAssemblies setting.

The target “RunResolvePublishAssemblies” does not exist in the project

Digging around the internet did not give an indication where to look. Most examples pointed to years old issues that indicated this message for dotnet core version 1.0. I am running a preview version of 3.0, so that could be the issue.

Testing creating another Function but with Visual Studio did have the same result: the error occurs there as well.

Finding the issue

Eventually I grabbed another working project with Azure Functions that we where running for a couple of months and went through all its settings to figure out what the issue could be.

Checked items:

• The project SDK had been set correctly to Microsoft.NET.Sdk
• The host.json pointed to a correct function host version (2.0)

Eventually I found the culprit! Because the global.json isn’t present, the dotnet core version wasn’t fixed to any version and that is why it uses a version that doesn’t work.

The fix

Add a global.json file into the root of the project folder with this content, pinning the sdk version to something working for Azure Functions, and build the project again.

{
  "sdk": {
    "version": "2.1.502"
  }
}