CODEWITHSUNDEEP
visual-studiomsbuild
Dave
Dave

Reputation: 291

MSBuild - can it work out project dependencies in a solution file? If so how?

I have an msbuild project which builds a SLN file from visual studio which holds all the projects in (about 70+ project), and a lot of the projects are dependent on each other meaning they need to be build in order - sometimes a developer forgets to set the build order manually in visual studio in the solution file causing the msbuild on a clean solution to fail as something gets built out of order/cant find a dll.

Is there a way for msbuild to take all projects and work out the dependencies and build the projects in order, if there is how do i do this? using an MSBuild task? With current tries it seems to just build in the order it reads the projects in - if i pass in a list of project files+paths.

Currently the only way i can think to solve this is a external app which scans the proj files and references and then manually creates a solution each time.. but this seems overkill for such a simple thing.

Anyone solved / seen this before?

Upvotes: 21

Views: 23066

Answers (7)

C.J.
C.J.

Reputation: 16081

There is no Microsoft tool that will examine all the dependencies of your 70+ projects and generate a solution file with dependencies clearly declared for you.

You have to do that on your own by using 2 different methods:

  1. Manually specify a dependency, for the solution, in visual studio.
  2. Specify a project reference in the project file itself.

If you don't want to do that, then you will have to swallow the medicine and accept that you will to use an external tool to do that for you. Yes it's clunky but it can be made to work. If you check in your solution file to your source control you can mitigate these problems. As long as you have an active solution file to work with.

I at one point didn't, and I had 600+ projects in the build. So I wrote a tool (years ago) that would automate 99% of this work. It uses the .NET MSBuild API's to read the msbuild files (no recreating the wheel here with xml api's). It then examines outputs and inputs and generate a dependency tree which I can then do a few things with it:

  1. Spit out a solution file.
  2. Do a dependency sort (also a topological sort in academia), and spit out those projects in order they should be built (for a non-parallel type of build, which can be useful sometimes).
  3. print out all sorts of diagnostic information about dependencies.

The only limitation I have seen with the tool is with a few crazy COM dependencies which are pretty sketchy anyways. Which I added a super simple work-around.

Upvotes: 0

Henry Aloni
Henry Aloni

Reputation: 647

I am using Msbuild 4 found at c:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v4.0.30319\MSBuild.exe It seems to solve the problem.

Upvotes: 0

Ruben Bartelink
Ruben Bartelink

Reputation: 61795

While Project Dependencies are hard to maintain and not shared across .sln files, Project References are honoured and do dictate the order consistently - see the ResolveReferences task in Microsoft.Common.targets.

ASIDE: A 'friend of mine' may 'during a refactoring' have accidentally stubbed out their Build Task and it's DependsOnTargets linkage to the Microsoft.Common.targets ResolveReferences task and ended up with ProjectReferences not being honoured in ways that sound like the question here. If you read some of the posts, you might get the idea that it's all mad shaky - it's not; the shaky bits are the Project dependencies, not the Project references.

See this excellent MSDN Blog article by Dan Moseley that really explains the topic, including some useful workaround strategies. (via this mildly related issue with building xUnit.net).

Upvotes: 5

Sixto Saez
Sixto Saez

Reputation: 12680

This is an old question but the issue was most likely that projects in the solution used direct references to dependent DLLs (Add Reference > select Browse tab > select dependent DLL) instead of using project references (Add Reference > select Projects tab > select dependent project). With direct references, Visual Studio can't figure out the dependency chain. You must tell it by right clicking on the solution node and select Properties. Pick Common Properties > Project Dependencies to set the required projects. Mr. Klaus is correct but I wanted to document how to fix this issue.

Upvotes: 1

Reputation:

While it is correct that MSBuild should observe the build order when you use project dependencies there is one caveat. It doesn't at present observe the reverse build order when building the clean target (as I have blogged about here). For regular build however it works nicely as described by others here.

Upvotes: 0

Scott Dorman
Scott Dorman

Reputation: 42516

How are you calling MSBuild? If you point MSBuild to the solution file, it should be able to work out the dependencies. If you point it to individual project files, then it won't be able to resolve any project references.

If you don't use project references you can still control the dependency order in a solution by using the "Project Dependencies" dialog to manually set the dependencies.

Upvotes: 4

Mr. Kraus
Mr. Kraus

Reputation: 8135

If all of your dependent projects are in the solution and you are using Project references, Visual Studio should manage the dependencies for your and build in order of that dependency list.

It sounds like you are not using project references. I always recommend project references.

Upvotes: 1

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