Visual Studio / MSBuild - 'Clean' Solution

0
votes

I am working with the web application Umbraco. To speed up my workflow I have made the 'served' Umbraco folder a project inside my visual studio solution. This allows me to create other projects (.Logic, .Wcf, .etc) which my umbraco web application then depends on.

This solution works very nicely (easy to debug, no xcopy, etc). However, if a 'clean' is issued (msbuild solution.sln /t:Clean), MSBuild, looks at Umbraco's /bin folder and as you would expect, and cleans this directory. Resulting in a solution that will not build. (e.g. it see's lots of DLL's not used within the Solution and deletes them - essentially deleting the Umbraco application)

  • Product
    • Product.Logic (project containing Logic)
    • Product.Web (project containing Umbraco application)

Is there a way of making MSBuild aware that these files (inside /bin) should not be deleted? Or would a better approach be to separate the Umbraco DLL's and my projects /bin, and later recombine them in a build event?

I have experimented with adding the DLL's as References into the CSProj, but this does not solve the problem.

<ItemGroup>
<Reference Include="businesslogic">
  <SpecificVersion>False</SpecificVersion>
  <Private>True</Private>
</Reference>
<Reference Include="ClientDependency.Core">
  <SpecificVersion>False</SpecificVersion>
  <Private>True</Private>
</Reference>
</ItemGroup>
<!-- etc -->

Best of wishes,

Laurence

2
visual-studiomsbuildumbraco

2 Answers

1
votes

I would recommend just copying the needed DLLs to the respective project's bin folder as a Pre-build Event for the project that needs them. That way, the built-in "clean" functionality does not have to be customized and your process will be a little less brittle.

1
votes

I have now found a more robust solution to this issue, inspired by the above.

The problem is, the visual studio project can only be aware of what is inside your project. By working directly in the Umbraco wwwroot, the visual studio BIN becomes muddled with Umbraco's. This makes 'cleaning' the solution or accurately tracking DLL's impossible.

I would recommend setting the 'output' directory to a 'clean' location, and then copying the files across during the build. This works particular well for multiple project solutions.

  1. Project Properties
  2. Build Tab
  3. Configuration = All Configurations
  4. Output Path = ..\output\

You then need a build even to copy the contents of this directory into your Umbraco Bin. This can be done using MSBUILD. This could be placed inside the *.csproj of the project that contains Umbraco.

<!-- Copy output DLLs into BIN -->
<ItemGroup>
  <ProjectsOutput Include="..\output\**\*.*" />
</ItemGroup>
<Copy SourceFiles="@(ProjectsOutput)"   DestinationFolder="bin\%(RecursiveDir)" />