Question

I am trying to make a build script for a .NET solution which consists of several c# projects and one custom project. The custom project can be build by devenv but msbuild chokes on it.

I would like MSBuild to ignore the custom project because I’m already building it with an Exec task. I actually need MSBuild to not even open the custom .proj file because it’s in JSON format and thus causes MSBuild to crash out.

The /BuildProjectReferences=false switch doesn’t work. MSBuild still tries to read the custom project file. Is there any way around this?

Answer 1

This question stemmed from a project which had a SilverFrost Fortran project alongside several c# class libraries. The solution would only compile using devenv. Msbuild would throw an error on the Fortran project because it doesn’t use the standard .csproj format.

Even with /BuildProjectReferences=false, msbuild would try to read the Fortran project and throw an error. The workaround I discovered was to wrap the msbuild task in an nant task which does the following:

1. Invokes the Fortran command line compiler
2. Removes all references to the Fortran project from other .csproj projects using the xmlpoke task
3. Replaces said references with a direct dll reference to the Fortran compiler output
4. Invokes Msbuild on the modified solution