Question

So our build system and source control system is from Perforce, which is a piece of poopers.

We want to change reference to dlls in the project to some other location, for example, current reference might be C:\blah\debug\blah.dll, we want to change it d:\codeinjected\blah\debug\blah.dll

But we don’t want to do this is the VStudio project file, because that is also our MSBuild build lab file, so is there a way to make an addin that can do it on the fly, without actually changing the references?

Answer 1

It sounds like you situationally want to change the location of reference DLL’s for a Visual Studio project. The easiest way to do this is to add condional constructs into the MsBuild file itself.

<Reference Condition="$(OnDevMachine)">
  ...
</Reference>
<Reference Condition="$(OnLabMachine)">
  ...
</Reference>

Another option is to have a common msbuild file for all of your projects. In that particular project you can create a conditionally defined value pointing to the reference directory and have every leaf project reference that variable. It will be less code and possibly more amenable to your build guy.

<PropertyGroup>
  <ReferenceDir Condition="$(OnDevMachine) == 'true'">Some\Dev\Path</ReferenceDir> 
  <ReferenceDir Condition="$(OnLabMachine) == 'true'">Some\Lab\Path</ReferenceDir>
</PropertyGroup>