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Billy ONeal
Billy ONeal

Reputation: 106539

What does the Private setting do on a ProjectReference in a MSBuild project file?

I saw this in a project file the other day:

<ProjectReference Include="Foo\Bar\Baz.csproj">
    <Project>{A GUID HERE}</Project>
    <Name>Baz</Name>
    <Private>False</Private> <!-- ??? -->
    <ReferenceOutputAssembly>False</ReferenceOutputAssembly>
</ProjectReference>

Every node in a ProjectReference appears to be self explanatory (the referenced project file, GUID, name to show in the solution explorer, and whether or not the current project should link to the referenced project) except Private, and the Common MSBuild Project Items page doesn't document this value. (There's a Private setting documented for Reference rather than ProjectReference -- but it has Never, Always, and PreserveNewest settings, not true and false)

What does this setting do?

Upvotes: 179

Views: 92231

Answers (2)

Mitch
Mitch

Reputation: 22251

Private metadata on a ProjectReference item corresponds to the "Copy Local" property on the reference node in Visual Studio's Solution Explorer.

It controls whether the reference should be copied to the output folder or not:

  • true means the reference should be copied
  • false means the reference should NOT be copied

This is documented in Common MSBuild project items, as well as the MSBuild source itself in Microsoft.Common.CurrentVersion.targets:

<!--
============================================================

                  ResolveAssemblyReferences

Given the list of assemblies, find the closure of all assemblies that they depend on. These are
what we need to copy to the output directory.

    [IN]
    @(Reference) - List of assembly references as fusion names.
    @(_ResolvedProjectReferencePaths) - List of project references produced by projects that this project depends on.

        The 'Private' attribute on the reference corresponds to the Copy Local flag in IDE.
        The 'Private' flag can have three possible values:
            - 'True' means the reference should be Copied Local
            - 'False' means the reference should not be Copied Local
            - [Missing] means this task will decide whether to treat this reference as CopyLocal or not.

    [OUT]
    @(ReferencePath) - Paths to resolved primary files.
    @(ReferenceDependencyPaths) - Paths to resolved dependency files.
    @(_ReferenceRelatedPaths) - Paths to .xmls and .pdbs.
    @(ReferenceSatellitePaths) - Paths to satellites.
    @(_ReferenceSerializationAssemblyPaths) - Paths to XML serialization assemblies created by sgen.
    @(_ReferenceScatterPaths) - Paths to scatter files.
    @(ReferenceCopyLocalPaths) - Paths to files that should be copied to the local directory.

============================================================
-->

Upvotes: 182

Teneko
Teneko

Reputation: 1491

I want just to state, that <Private>false</Private> (which you can apply to ProjectReferences) may not work when using <MSBuild Projects="$(MSBuildProjectFullPath)" Targets="Publish" Properties="$(_MSBuildProperties)" /> and project $(MSBuildProjectFullPath) have ProjectReferences that have <None><CopyToPublishDirectory>PreserveNewest</CopyToPublishDirectory></None> . I've read the source code around https://github.com/dotnet/sdk/blob/master/src/Tasks/Microsoft.NET.Build.Tasks/targets/Microsoft.NET.Publish.targets and found the solution. You need to define _GetChildProjectCopyToPublishDirectoryItems=false so an example would be: <MSBuild Projects="$(MSBuildProjectFullPath)" Targets="Publish" Properties="TargetFramework=$(TargetFramework);_GetChildProjectCopyToPublishDirectoryItems=false" />

Upvotes: 2

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