We have an application wrote in C#, which broken into several projects. These projects have reference to others.
When someone gets the source from version control and opens the solution contains these projects on its own machine, Visual Studio cannot find the references between projects, even though referenced project is build successfully. That person have to re-add the reference to solve this.
Seems to me that Visual Studio keeps some data in `suo’ file, so next time it knows where to find that re-added reference, and this problem won’t appear next time the person opens the solution.
Since `suo’ file keeps absolute path to references, we cannot commit it in our source control.
The problem is, We’ve got a separate machine, which builds this big application automatically (as our nightly-build releases) When the build-automation tool opens the solution, and calls Visual Studio’s compiler to build it, the references cannot be find. (automation tool cleans everything, and get the latest version of the source again, so it dose not have `suo’ file.)
Any solution?
Extra information
Visual Studio version: 2008 – 9.0.21022.8
.Net framework: 3.5 SP1
OS: Windows XP Professional (SP2 & SP3 – we have both of them)
Update
Seems that Visual Studio changes <ProjectReference> tag to <Reference> in `.csproj’ files sometimes. Our developers commit the file, and this problem happens.
I couldn’t find if it’s a bug in Visual Studio. The only solution that comes into my mind is to write a tool to correct this in `.csproj’ files, before pass it to the automation tool.
It’s a bug in VisualStudio 2008 and before that.
If you open a solution that contains a project that have reference to another project, but referenced project doesn’t included in the solution, VS finds the referenced project, but changes the reference in a way that it refers to the output DLL, not the project itself.
This bug is fixed in VS2010, and MSBuild 4.