For those who are running into a slight variation of this problem, I just found a solution.
Pre-requisites:
using VS 2015 and SQL Server 2012.
Symptom:
can't load this subsystem:
Microsoft.SqlServer.management.sdk.sfc version 12.0.0.0
At this point you might be like me and confused that you are using SQL Server 2012 but VS 2015 is trying to use version 12.0.0.0, which comes from SQL Server 2014.
It turns out that when you install SQL Server 2012, it installs a couple of components from SQL Server 2014. At one point I removed all traces of SQL Server from my machine (using the Add Programs control panel). When I re-installed SQL Server 2012, it either didn't re-install the 2014 components or I deleted them again thinking I missed them the first time around.
The result was that I didn't have the necessary 2014 libraries on my system. I also tried to install the 2014 Shared Management Objects as pointed out above, but that didn't work because I didn't have the CLR runtime from 2014. So in order to get a VS 2015 system working with a SQL Server 2012, you have to make sure that these two 2014 packages are installed:
- ENU\x64\SQLSysClrTypes.msi
- ENU\x64\SharedManagementObjects.msi
from SQL Server 2014 Feature Pack. Pick the 32 bit versions if you need to.
Here is the site that helped me figure this out.