MSBuild 4.5 is ignoring project dependencies

Question

I have a VS2010 solution file with over 20 projects in it, and some of the projects have dependencies on other projects from within the solution.

I also have multiple build configurations set up for different purposes, but I've trimmed down the projects to be built to just include the bare minimum number of projects.

For example, I have three libraries (A, B, and C), a website project, and a website deployment project (VS2010). The website has references to libraries A and B, and B in turn has a reference to C. My build configuration only has the website and the deployment project checked. When I check the project dependencies from the solution's properties, the website correctly lists the libraries, and B shows C, as expected.

When I run the build against my build config from within VS2010, it works completely fine, but when I run MSBuild on the solution specifying my configuration (as follows), it just results in a bunch of errors.

msbuild.exe mysolution.sln /t:Build /p:configuration=MyConfig

Here's an example of the errors I get:

Services\IService.cs(11,63): error CS0246: The type or namespace name 'Priority' could not be found (are you missing a using directive or an assembly reference?)

I noticed this happening on my build server (TeamCity v7.1.2), but I can reproduce it on multiple machines, and I narrowed it down to an issue with MSBuild, itself.

It only started happening after I installed .NET 4.5 (and 2 security patches), so I uninstalled it, reinstalled .NET 4.0 (with patches) since it was also removed, then tried the same command, and it worked just fine.

This leads me to believe that something was changed or broken in MSBuild with .NET 4.5, but nothing in their documentation seems to talk about this kind of change.

MSBuild 4.5 documentation: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh162058.aspx

I've even tried passing BuildProjectDependencies=true to MSBuild, and it comes up stating that it skipped the other projects because they were not selected in the configuration manager, which is correct and intentional.

The only way I got it to work with MSBuild 4.5 was to go back and select the projects that were being skipped, but since the actual solution is a bit more complex with the dependency chain, I don't want to have to try to manage the configurations manually each time we update the solution with new projects or dependencies. It SHOULD be automatic.

Any ideas with what I'm doing?

Answer 1

If you still not resolved this issue, lets try some blind shots:

1. Msbuild have confirmed bug when it sometimes generates wrong build order based on followed dependencies. Try to build not entire solution but exact project you want to build - like msbuild.exe YourWebsiteProject.csproj /t:Clean;Build /p:configuration=MyConfig. Is the problem still persists ?

2. Ensure that YourWebsiteProject and your libs (B and C) have proper references - on project, not on dll in another project folder (simplest way to fix that - remove from B reference to C and re-add it again, just ensure that you are adding project reference and not browsing to bin\Debug for very C.dll). Is issue still there ?

If you could provide detailed or even diagnostic msbuild log (add to your msbuild command line following switches /ds /v:diag and then share teamcity full build log somewhere or pipe command line log to file) or some sample projects set where I can reproduce this behaviour - it could help a lot with issue resolving.