I tried creating a new, empty ASP.NET Web Application in Visual Studio 2013, with MVC support and got the exception “Exception has been thrown by the target of an invocation” repeatedly.  It always seemed to create the App_Data folder and not much else. Long story short,  after some googling,  I installed SQL Server Express 2012, made sure it was running and then started VS2013.  After that I can create the above project with no error. From this experience, I’d recommend selecting the SQL Express option when installing Visual Studio, even if you don’t plan on using a local database server.