.Net Deployment Project's Detected Dependencies magically un-excluded

Question

I have a Visual Studio 2005 .NET solution that has 20+ sub projects including a deployment project. The VS2005 .NET deployment project has a number of detected dependences, that have been manually excluded and corrected values manually added in.

Sometimes however, these detected dependencies get magically un-excluded, which triggers a warning on the build: WARNING: Two or more objects have the same target location ('[targetdir]\')

What is the trigger that causes a detected dependency to be un-excluded? Can deployment solutions have their warnings treated as errors so the nightly build won't proceed?

Answer 1

I have had that same issue and dealt with it for about a year before giving up and moving over to WiX. It also did not help that I had to 'double-build' my builds because MSBuild for VS2005 will not work with deployment projects.

Anyway, you may want to consider something like WiX for your installs.

Answer 2

It happens when the dependent project has "Copy Local" set on a dependent DLL. The deployment/setup project has both the source and the copy of the DLL listed as a dependency.