How to avoid that Visual Studio incremental build does not run when files outside <Compile> and <EmbeddedResource> are changed?

Question

I have a VS2017 csharp project and the .csproj file looks like the following:

<Project Sdk="Microsoft.NET.Sdk">

    <PropertyGroup>
        <OutputType>Exe</OutputType>
        <TargetFramework>netcoreapp2.0</TargetFramework>
    </PropertyGroup>
  
    <ItemGroup>
        <MyItem Include="file.dat" />
    </ItemGroup>

    <PropertyGroup>
        <PrepareResourcesDependsOn>
            $(PrepareResourcesDependsOn);
            MyCompileTarget
         </PrepareResourcesDependsOn>
        <CoreCompileDependsOn>
            $(CoreCompileDependsOn);
            MyCompileTarget
        </CoreCompileDependsOn>
    </PropertyGroup>

    <Target Name="MyCompileTarget" Inputs="@(MyItem)" Outputs="@(MyItem->'%(FileName).out')">
    ...
    </Target>
 </Project>

Where MyCompileTarget is a target that generates the file.out from file.dat (in the actual code the incremental build target and properties are in a target file automatically included via a NuGet package).

The issue is that if I change file.dat and press on Build, no target is executed at all, (but MyTarget is correctly executed with Rebuild or when running with msbuild). I would expect the MyCompileTarget to be executed so that the file.out file is updated.

The same issue occurs if I use BeforeBuild or AfterBuild instead of PrepareResourcesDependsOn etc.

It seems that Visual Studio incremental build won't start unless some file in @(Compile) or @(EmbeddedResource) is changed. Indeed, if I add the following

<EmbeddedResource>file.dat</EmbeddedResource>

the incremental build works as expected (but clearly I do not want to embeed the file.dat into the generated assembly).

Is it possible to force Visual Studio to enable incremental build if file.dat is modified, and if the corresponding generated file is older than file.dat or it does not exist?

Note: the same issue occurs using VS2015, with .NET CORE or .NET FRAMEWORK. Also, incremental build will be triggered if I change a csharp file, and it will therefore trigger MyTask, but only if file.dat is newer than the generated file (as expected).

Thanks in advance, Fabio.

Answer 1

Is it possible to force Visual Studio to enable incremental build if file.dat is modified

You can set the property DisableFastUpToDateCheck to true in the project file to disable FastUpToDateCheck for Visual Studio build manager:

<PropertyGroup>
    <DisableFastUpToDateCheck>True</DisableFastUpToDateCheck>
</PropertyGroup>

Check MSDN about DisableFastUpToDateCheck:

A boolean value that applies to Visual Studio only. The Visual Studio build manager uses a process called FastUpToDateCheck to determine whether a project must be rebuilt to be up to date. This process is faster than using MSBuild to determine this. Setting the DisableFastUpToDateCheck property to true lets you bypass the Visual Studio build manager and force it to use MSBuild to determine whether the project is up to date

Update:

Also, we can set the UpToDateCheckInput to the item:

<UpToDateCheckInput Include="file.dat" />