Question

I am trying to add a project and file reference to the same dll in the csproj with the BuildingInVsideisualStudio property. But when they are in the csproj together, only the file reference is picked up. If I remove the file reference, it picks up the csproj. I have tried swapping the order, but no luck. Any ideas why this doesn’t work?

Here is the basic idea:

<ItemGroup Condition="'$(BuildingInsideVisualStudio)' == false">
    <Reference Include="MyNamespace.Mine">
        <HintPath>..\$(OutDir)\MyNamespace.Mine.dll</HintPath>
    </Reference>
</ItemGroup>
<ItemGroup Condition="'$(BuildingInsideVisualStudio)' == '' Or '$(BuildingInsideVisualStudio)' == true">
    <ProjectReference Include="..\MyNamespace.Mine.csproj">
        <Project>{GUID}</Project>
        <Name>MyNamespace.Mine</Name>
    </ProjectReference>
</ItemGroup>

Someone else has gone down this path, too, but it appears there are some caveats. I need to do this conditional because of my build process, which cannot change. Using the file reference forces me to lose the Go to Definition and Find All References (sorry, but I cannot install ReSharper to solve this either).

Answer 1

Assuming I understood the question correctly after bit of experimentation it seems that naming them differently would solve most of the problems; msbuild would respect the condition and use assembly reference, VS would display them both in solution explorer but would prebuilt the reference as if it is project kind and would keep goto-definition without R# working. Conditional import is something else worth looking into but I haven’t tried it.

<ItemGroup>
    <ProjectReference Include="..\ClassLibrary1\ClassLibrary1.csproj" Condition="'$(Foo)'=='Bar1'">
        <Project>{FD0E01BC-7777-4620-9EF2-5F60804B3173}</Project>
        <Name>ClassLibrary1-ProjRef</Name>
    </ProjectReference>
    <Reference Include="ClassLibrary1" Condition="'$(Foo)'=='Bar2'">
        <Name>ClassLibrary1-AssRef</Name>
        <HintPath>..\ClassLibrary1\bin\Debug\ClassLibrary1.dll</HintPath>
    </Reference>
</ItemGroup>