Reference a project in Visual Studio and build it for a specific platform

Question

I have a project A which is supposed to be built for x86 and it depends on another project B which is built for x64. I can build it as it is of course but I would like no runtime issues.

So the idea is for me to set project A up so that if I want to build it for x86 I can reference project B but have it built for x86 and if I want to build project A for x64 then I reference project B but have it built for x64. Is this possible?

I put a condition in the.csproj of Project A like:

<ItemGroup Condition=" '$(Platform)' == 'x86' ">

    <ProjectReference Include="..\Project B\projB.csproj">
      <Project>{678c5dc7-7a1c-45g3-bffe-a4754c64f027}</Project>
      <Name>projB</Name>
    </ProjectReference>
</ItemGroup>

<!-- x64 specific referneces -->
<ItemGroup Condition=" '$(Platform)' == 'x64' ">

    <ProjectReference Include="..\Project B\projB.csproj">
      <Project>{678c5dc7-7a1c-45g3-bffe-a4754c64f027}</Project>
      <Name>projB</Name>
    </ProjectReference>
</ItemGroup>

But I don't know how to have that referenced project build for a specific platform. I know I could just take the.dlls of the two versions and apply a condition for normal references but wanted to see if this is viable. Is it possible? Would I need two separate identical projects but with different target platforms to do this?

Would appreciate if you could help me, thanks!

Answer 1

Reference a project in Visual Studio and build it for a specific platform

Project Reference is quite different. And What you provide is to build a project on different platforms based on project A . Project B will not use the corresponding version of platform to build Project B according to the platform change in A .

And Project Reference is actually to build project B first and then build project A , Reference the corresponding Project B . It needs to be configured again.

Update

In your situation, when build project A, it has a condition like Condition=" '$(Platform)' == 'x86' " , it is only based on the current platform of project A, but this parameter cannot be passed to project B to compile the project as x86 . So you should

Therefore , you need to manually change the platform of B to achieve your goal.

Solution

1) Build --> Configuration Manager and change like these to build your project.

or

2) When you build Porject A with x86 , you should first change Project B to x86 platform and when you do the same with x64 , you should also do the same operation to Project B.

Right-click on your project A and B--> Properties --> Build --> change Platform target to both x64 or x86.

And then you can get the same platform output file in project A ouputpath folder.

In addition , you can try to build Project B based on x64 , x86 platform at the same time(could refer to this link ) and then use like your xml code in Project A(according to x64 or x86 platform) to reference(assembly reference) the corresponding project B.dll.

Hope it could help you.