Using project reference instead of nuget package while developing?

Question

we have a project A (csproj, netstandard2.0) that we would like to release as a nuget package.

We want to use this package in project B using <packageReference> (csproj, .net framework 4.7.2) to speed up builds on our build server. Because we won't need to build project A before build of project B.

To ease development however i would like to have a solution that includes both projects, so that i can edit the source of project A and (re-)compile so that project B makes use of project A's latest version (without the need to pack a new nupkg of project A (and publish it on our nuget package source server if possible)). (While still using nuget on our build server)

How can this be archieved?

I searched the web and stackoverflow but couldn't find a way how this is intended to work.

Thanks

Answer 1

As @Zivkan says, this is a bit of an odd thing to do for a number of reasons, but if you want to try it, I think the following would work:

You could use a conditional statement in your project so that when built locally it uses a project reference, but when built on the build machine you specify a property in the command line to use a package reference instead.
e.g.

<Choose>
  <When Condition="'$(IsBuildServer)' == 'true'">
    <ItemGroup>
      <PackageReference Include="A" Version="*" />
    </ItemGroup>
  </When>
  <Otherwise>
    <ItemGroup>
      <ProjectReference Include="relativepath\A.csproj" />
    </ItemGroup>
  </Otherwise>
</Choose>

And then when building on the build server, just make sure to specify -p:IsBuildServer=true as a command line argument to msbuild / dotnet build.

The "*" in the package reference just means take the latest available stable package, but may not be exactly what you want depending on what exactly you want the build server to build.