CODEWITHSUNDEEP
c#visual-studiovisual-studio-2012msbuildnuget
artganify
artganify

Reputation: 703

Build, pack up and deploy for multiple platform targets

I'm looking forward to setup an environment/configuration that allows me to build and deploy a custom library for multiple platforms / targets, such as build configurations and/or .NET framework versions. For this, I've laid out the following structure:

MyProject.sln
src\
   File1.cs
   File2.Net30.cs
   MyProject.Net40.csproj
   MyProject.Net30.csproj
   MyProject.Net45.csproj

All project files are included in the solutions and built at once. Each project contains the source files for the framework it targets and/or all files where as different .NET versions are compiled conditionally (using compiler directives, e.g. NET35, NET34_OR_GREATER). Additionally, each project file contains the following msbuild directives:

<OutputPath>bin\$(Configuration)\$(Platform)\$(TargetFrameworkVersion)\$(TargetFrameworkIdentifier)\</OutputPath>
<BaseIntermediateOutputPath>obj\$(Configuration)\$(Platform)\$(TargetFrameworkVersion)\$(TargetFrameworkIdentifier)\</BaseIntermediateOutputPath>
<DocumentationFile>bin\$(Configuration)\$(Platform)\$(TargetFrameworkVersion)\$(TargetFrameworkIdentifier)\$(AssemblyName).xml</DocumentationFile>

This allows me to build them all at once by routing the output into different directories.

Now, that's all for building. However, I'm really stuck with deployment, especially related to NuGet. I've created a .nuspec where I include every dependency manually:

<file src="bin\Release\AnyCPU\v4.0\MyProject.dll" target="lib\net40-client\EIT.Foundation.dll" />
<file src="bin\Release\AnyCPU\v4.0\MyProject.xml" target="lib\net40-client\EIT.Foundation.xml" />
<file src="bin\Release\AnyCPU\v4.5\MyProject.dll" target="lib\net45\MyProject.dll" />

This works fine, but is really tedious. So first question: Is there any way to hook up the files automagically?

And my second problem: Sometimes my libraries have NuGet dependencies themselves. For project dependencies, a packages.config is automatically created in the same folder as the project when downloading NuGet dependencies. The packages.config not only contains the dependency or its version used in the project, but also which framework version of the dependency is required. This is a bit of a problem since every project file (for each framework target) resides in the same folder, so they would need to share the same packages.config file somehow. I'd tried relocating the project files to a different structure like this:

MyProject.sln
target\
   net40\MyProject.Net40.csproj
src\
   File1.cs

... however then I'm unable to preserve the folder structure in my source folder (if there's any) because the project files only allow me to include files, not folders (they are being automatically included.) Is there any way around this or is NuGet simply not suited for multi-target builds?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 785

Answers (1)

Matt Ward
Matt Ward

Reputation: 47987

Whilst NuGet supports creating a NuGet package for a particular project it is targeted for single projects. The command is NuGet pack YourProject.csproj so I suspect it will not help you. Using a .nuspec file is probably the only way to get this working.

NuGet supports multiple projects in the same directory if you rename the packages.config file. Each packages.config file should be named after the project. So in your example the following should work:

  • packages.MyProject.Net40.config
  • packages.MyProject.Net30.config
  • packages.MyProject.Net45.config

Upvotes: 4

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