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I have been wrestling with this for a few days and after tons of searching I can't find the path I should be on.
What I want to do is set up an MSBUILD project that will build our entire .NET application (constst of 8 solutions, and maybe 250 projects split up between them) with a number of settings overridden from the individual project files to make a debug build for myself.
Specifically I want to build our release configuration with optimizations off and full debug info / pdbs generated. Also, in order to reduce our currently ultra-long build time I want "copy local" (or private in the actual proj file xml) false for every reference of every project.
The first things were fairly easy, I can override a project level property fairly easily (you can even do this from the MSBuild command line using /p), but what I can't figure out is how to override a property on a reference. I have tried several things I saw here on StackOverflow and around the web, but nothing is a solution yet.
I can do what I want by altering Microsoft.Common.targets, commenting out the code in the _CopyFilesMarkedCopyLocal target completely skips the copying of these files. But I don't want to alter my global configuration and do this in all circumstances. I created my own alternate targets file -- which works if I alter an individual project file to point to it -- but I can't figure out how to specify this to be used at the top level (my .proj file that just builds all 8 solutions). It would be great if I could somehow override just the _CopyFilesMarkedCopyLocal target at the top level so that if MS changes the default targets file my build isn't screwed up, but I can't figure out how to make this work either.
The best possible thing would be if there was a way to just override reference level properties like you can project level properties, without having to rewrite/override the build targets stuff -- but I have found no information indicating this is possible.
Thanks in advance for any help on this.
P.S. It is not possible for me to actually just go through all the projects files and change them; I need a solution that leaves the existing code in place as is.
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The Private tag maintains the user-override to the "Copy Local" checkbox in the Visual Studio References folder. This controls whether the reference is used from the GAC or whether it will copy the referenced assembly to the build directory.
A target element can have both Inputs and Outputs attributes, indicating what items the target expects as input, and what items it produces as output. If all output items are up-to-date, MSBuild skips the target, which significantly improves the build speed. This is called an incremental build of the target.
Copy Local essentially means I must manually deploy this DLL in order for my application to work. When it's false it essentially means "I depend on another component which must be installed separately or chained, the DLL will just be there already".
Try this:
Set the CustomAfterMicrosoftCommonTargets to C:\foo\filter.targets (or whatever you name the file) and have filter.targets to be:
<Project xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/developer/msbuild/2003"> <ItemDefinitionGroup> <Reference> <Private>False</Private> </Reference> </ItemDefinitionGroup> </Project> If you love us? You can donate to us via Paypal or buy me a coffee so we can maintain and grow! Thank you!
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