Consider a solution has 2 projects: ProjectA and ProjectB (both are MonoTouch apps) and ProjectBase. ProjectBase contains the whole application, but Main.cs file (with the entry point) is located in ProjectA and ProjectB (which reference ProjectBase). This way, running any of A/B projects will boot up the application from ProjectBase.
Now, I want to override something for ProjectA only (it might be XIB file, image or a .NET class). Is there any way I can setup the solution so that the code and resources, produced by ProjectBase, are merged with the ones from ProjectA/ProjectB and the latter wins?
I found (probably a quirky and kinda-undefined-behavior-driven way) of overriding XIBs: I just put a XIB into ProjectA and ProjectB, name it the same as it was named in ProjectBase and them exclude it from ProjectBase. Although MonoDevelop compiles all items, it seems that the startup project’s XIBs get priority, so that I see ProjectA-specific XIBs when I launch ProjectA and ProjectB-specific XIBs when I launch ProjectB. However, I am not sure it is the way it should behave, plus, from what I can see from build log, ALL projects get built yielding resources at the end.
P.S. I’m sorry if this has been asked previously, but I was not able to find the similar question on SO.
I was once trying to do this for a bunch of apps. I would have thought build order would be ProjectBase and then ProjectA, and the content copy system would be the same… Guess this means we are wrong.
You could do a few things.
A) Build your own program to copy resources which are marked for content. Would not be very hard, just need to read the .csproj files. XML parsing is easy enough in .NET. Run this program on post build. Would just have to be careful when doing builds such as to zip or to the device as I am not sure how it handles post-build events.
B) [This is what I did instead] If I expect to also make ProjectC, ProjectD … ProjectN I instead made a program to generate my program… (Programception).
What it does, has ProjectBase, and ProjectTempalte. You enter your new project name into this program, say, “MyNewProject” and it will create the correct folder structure, write the correct csproj files, and update SLN file. ProjectTemplate has various placeholders in .csproj files like {PLACEHOLDER} which Programception would just go through and find/replace with my project name. Image files (and in your case XIB) are then only kept within ProjectA (B..C..N) unless I do not expect to try and override them in which case they would stay in ProjectBase. This is a lot easier with a XIBless application I would assume. I never use XIB’s anyway.
Hope that helps!