Does MSBuild resolve project to project references when building a solution?

Question

MSDN docs Visual Studio Integration (MSBuild) state:

Building Solutions

Within Visual Studio, the solution file and project build ordering are controlled by Visual Studio itself. When building a solution with msbuild.exe on the command line, MSBuild parses the solution file and orders the project builds. In both cases the projects are built individually in dependency order, and project to project references are not traversed. In contrast, when individual projects are built with msbuild.exe, project to project references are traversed.

With my Visual Studio 2010, when building a .sln file with MSBuild from the command line, project to project references are all built, regardless whether they occur in the solution.

What did I miss here? Or are the docs plain wrong?

Answer 1

You are correct that msbuild.exe will sort out all project references whether or not they are part of the solution in contrast to building within Visual Studio 2010/2012/2013/2015 (and possibly later versions) where you will get a build failure if a referenced project is not part of the solution or built beforehand.

In short, yes, the documentation seems a bit off.

Answer 2

You can ignore the build of project to project reference by running msbuild Solution.sln /t:ProjectName /p:BuildProjectReferences=false this explain the sentence in msdn.