Question

I’m currently using msbuild for a solution of over 600 projects.

Imagine I change the code for 1 library that is used by 10 projects. Instead of providing all 600 projects to msbuild and let it compile all of them and figure out the dependencys. I was wondering if there was a program or library I could use that would analyse the dependencys of all 600 projects, and allow me to only compile the 11 that are necessary.

In other words given the input of all 600 projects to scan, and BaseLibrary.csproj as a project that has been modified parameter, provide me only the 11 projects I need to compile as output.

I’m experienced in writing custom tasks, I’d just rather use a third party library to do the dependency analysis if there is already one out there.

My company does incremental releases to production every 3-4 months. As an experiment I wrote a custom task that looks at the previous releases ‘Subversion tag’ and evaluates all the compiled files that have changed since then and maps them to a project.

The only use case I can think of that doesn’t work is the one I mentioned where a base library is changed and the system doesn’t know about all the projects that depend on it.

Answer 1

Have you tried .NET assembly dependency analyser?.

It is open source, and the graph output in dot script might be what you need. An example from the site:

digraph G {        size='100,69'       center=''       ratio=All       node[width=.25,hight=.375,fontsize=12,color=lightblue2,style=filled]       1 -> 9;       1 -> 11;       9 -> 10;       11 -> 10;       1 [label='Drew.Controls.Map'];       9 [label='Drew.Types'];       10 [label='nunit.framework'];       11 [label='Drew.Util'];  }  

With the list of projects and this script output, you can create your compilation list.