每次构建源项目时，如何跳过构建所有引用的项目

Question

I have Xamarin.Forms project which has many dependencies of other projects. When I am doing any modification in business logic every time I need to execute/build my project.

Due to many other projects dependencies it is taking huge time to complete built(10-15 mins) and showing build o/p.

Done building project "Project1.csproj".

Done building project "Project2.csproj".

Done building project "Project3.csproj".

Done building project "Project4.csproj".

Done building project "Project5.csproj".....

If I remove above projects dependencies from source project's .csproj file

 <ItemGroup>
    <ProjectReference Include="..\..\..\Components\Business\Project1\Project1.csproj" />
    <ProjectReference Include="..\..\..\Components\BusinessUI\Project2\Project2.csproj" />
    <ProjectReference Include="..\..\..\Components\Core\Project3\Project3.csproj" />
    <ProjectReference Include="..\..\..\Components\CoreUI\Project4\Project4.csproj" />
    <ProjectReference Include="..\..\..\Components\Shared\Project4\Project5.csproj" />
 </ItemGroup>

I am getting so many compile time errors

are you missing an assembly reference?

How can I build my source project without building all dependent projects every time so that I can save my time?

Answer 1

How have you referenced those projects? Are the referenced as project files, or their compiled.dll/.exe form?

It sounds like those were added as raw Projects/sourcecode. And in that case, of course they have to be compiled. It would be like trying to only compile half the sourcecode otherwise.

In .NET you can use any .NET.dll or .NET.exe as assembly reference. With the .NET internal stuff you always use.dll's. But.exe works too. You would have to deploy those.dll's/.exe's with the code, but something like copying it to the output directory as a build action should work. Indeed I never even heard of referencing the raw project, but it might be there somewhere.

Internally the .NET.exe is almost identically to a .NET.dll. Some bootstrap code and a entry point more, maybe some fringe stuff like COM interop less. It is one of those parts where they drew heavy inspiration from Java bytecode - and then made it better. So you can just add them as a reference.