TFS / msbuild, building project references

Question

I'm struggling to get Azure Devops Server 2019 (on prem) to build a complicated project setup of mine.

I have multiple solutions that build various BizTalk apps. Some of these solutions references some of the projects in other solutions/repos. This works fine in Visual Studio (providing everybody names their repos as the default, which they do).

To automate this build, I've created a multi-stage build pipeline that builds each solution in order.

Whilst solution 1 will build successfully, when it comes to solution 2, the msbuild tasks will not reference the outputs for the projects that have been included as a project reference in the solution.

This seems to be because these referenced projects aren't marked for build - because they wouldn't be able to build themselves without them in turn referencing their other projects in the main solutions etc.

Bundling everything into one big super solution file is not feasible.

I'm wanting msbuild to /reference the projects that have already been built in the previous step, as per being included as project references. But msbuild is a complicated beast and I cannot figure out a way of achieving this.

Is what I'm trying to achieve even possible? Can anybody point me in the right direction?

Answer 1

TFS / msbuild, building project references

This is a known issue about project reference in different Repos, but unfortunately it doesn't have a best answer. Because the best solution is always to have a single repository.

Git thinks of files as the content of the whole repository, not as a collection of files. Therefore this is quite hard to do. As workaround, you can consider to use Git Submodules or Git Subtree :

Check the details info from here:

Git and Visual Studio project references

Besides, the solution we are using now is to put the shared code in the NuGet package. Then, you can use the package from any repository, and you don't have to perform any unstable git settings and keep access control as they should be.

Hope this helps.

Answer 2

I've finally revisited this and done some more experimentation.

The only way, that I can see, to get TFS/msbuild to /reference other projects outputs is to mark them in the solution build configuration to build.

Now if you do this in Visual Studio and try and build a solution that has projects from another solution then the build will fail if the previous solution hasn't been fully built yet (as the other chained dependencies won't have been built). This makes sense.

But with TFS/msbuild, the build will succeed. From what I can tell there is some magic going on that ensures the dependencies across all solutions are somehow resolved. This might be luck, it might be specific behaviour (it's working for me so far).

The problem of course is that it's incompatible with Visual Studio. So I have an extra "Build" definition setup in each Solution file that has all the projects set to build.

This seems the easiest way to manage lots of interrelated solutions without having one big one.

Answer 3

It seems that msbuild was changed to only reference project references, and that you can revert that to reference all references by setting the property OnlyReferenceAndBuildProjectsEnabledInSolutionConfiguration to true when running msbuild.

Source: https://stackoverflow.com/a/25144169

Have confirmed this works.