Question

I have a solution with multiple projects. I am trying to use MSBUILD to automate the deployment. I have following configuration values for building
1. Debug
2. Release
3. Dev
For Some projects, I am using Release mode for DEV configuration. But while using DEV as configuration in MSBUILD command, it is throwing exception saying DEV configuration was not found.

Is there any way we can tell MSBUILD to use Release mode if DEV is not available for a project when DEV is used as configuration in MSBUILD?

Thanks
Ashwani

Answer 1

In your (presumably C#) project file, there is typically a line that looks like this:

<Configuration Condition=" '$(Configuration)' == '' ">Debug</Configuration>

For the projects that don’t have a “Dev” configuration, you can get the behavior you want by adding another line, right before that one…

<Configuration Condition=" '$(Configuration)' == 'Dev' ">Release</Configuration>
<Configuration Condition=" '$(Configuration)' == '' ">Debug</Configuration>

This way, when you build with “Dev” specified, these projects will build their Release configuration instead, which mimics the behavior of the solution’s configuration manager (which I tend to think of as an abomination of a feature) directly in the project file itself, which is the right place to do it.

Another approach is to use the AdditionalProperties metadata on the item array you would be passing to the MSBuild task to get your projects built. You can specify–for the projects of interest–the following…

<SolutionItem Include="./PathTo/SomeProject.csproj">
   <AdditionalProperties Condition="'$(Configuration)' == 'Dev'"
      >Configuration=Release</AdditionalProperties>
</SolutionItem>

(Excerpted from the book “MSBuild Trickery” trick #80)