Ignore NuGet package restore on .vdproj projects in Azure Pipelines - msbuild

Question

I'm attempting to set up an Azure DevOps build pipeline against a .NET Framework 4.7.2 solution which contains a Visual Studio Installer Project. I've set up a self-hosted agent on a Windows Server 2019 VM, which has Visual Studio 2019 Community installed. The build pipeline contains the NuGet Installer task, followed by the NuGet task, set up to restore the referenced NuGet Packages. Below is the YAML snippet:
- task: NuGetCommand#2
inputs:
command: 'restore'
restoreSolution: '$(solution)'
Running a build with this configuration however, results in the following error in the build logs:
[error]The nuget command failed with exit code(1) and error(C:\##############.vdproj(1,1): error MSB4025: The project file could not be loaded. Data at the root level is invalid. Line 1, position 1.)
This appears to be due to a performance enhancement that's been made in newer versions of nuget.exe. The suggestion, based on this GitHub issue, is to enable skipping non-existent package targets using the RestoreUseSkipNonexistentTargets MSBuild setting.
The GitHub issue mentions using the NUGET_RESTORE_MSBUILD_ARGS NuGet CLI environment variable in order to set this property, but I don't know how this can be achieved through the NuGet build task.
Since NuGet is now integrated with MSBuild, I then attempted to set this property to false through a command-line argument on the NuGet task. I modified the YAML, setting the command to custom in order to pass arguments. I based the syntax off of the MSBuild restore documentation. It now looks like follows:
- task: NuGetCommand#2
inputs:
command: 'custom'
arguments: 'restore "$(solution)" -p:RestoreUseSkipNonexistentTargets=false'
This build configuration results in the following error:
[error]The nuget command failed with exit code(1) and error(Unknown option: '-p:RestoreUseSkipNonexistentTargets=false')
My question is, how do I go about getting the NuGet restore task to skip package restore on .vdproj projects?
EDIT
The other project in the solution is a C# WinForms .NET Framework project. We're using packages.config rather than PackageReference.

Answer 1

As for your original issue: MSB4025
As you mentioned above, it's one open issue here. Anyone interested at it can track the issue there.
[error]The nuget command failed with exit code(1) and error(Unknown
option: '-p:RestoreUseSkipNonexistentTargets=false')
The nuget restore command won't recognize a msbuild property. See similar issue and more details here.
Since The other project in the solution is a C# WinForms .NET Framework project. We're using packages.config rather than PackageReference.
A workaround for this is to use nuget custom command like this:
- task: NuGetCommand#2
inputs:
command: 'custom'
arguments: 'restore YourProjectName\packages.config -PackagesDirectory $(Build.SourcesDirectory)\packages'
This can skip the restore step for the installer project.

Answer 2

In general you do not need to called nuget restore explicitly anymore. MSBuild does it automatically as part of the build (so you're likely doing it twice). You can add the p:RestoreUseSkipNonexistentTargets=false property to the MSBuild arguments of a VSBuild task or a DotNet build or publish task:
- task: DotNetCoreCLI#2
displayName: Build/Publish
inputs:
command: 'publish'
publishWebProjects: false
projects: '$(solution)'
arguments: '-r $(runtimeIdentifier) /p:RestoreUseSkipNonexistentTargets=false'
zipAfterPublish: false
modifyOutputPath: false

Answer 3

The best way i found :
use 3 tasks on the pipeline tested on vs2022 hosted image
All the tasks uses the Visual Studio 2022 Developer PowerShell.
Task 1 - restore nuget with ignoring the error of the unsupported vdproj
Task 2 - Build the solution with msbuild will not build the vdproj
Task 3 - Build the vdproj only using DevEnv
- task: PowerShell#2
displayName: "restore nuget"
inputs:
targetType: 'inline'
script: |
& 'C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio\2022\Enterprise\Common7\Tools\Launch-VsDevShell.ps1'
msbuild -t:restore .\<solution>.sln -p:RestoreUseSkipNonexistentTargets=false
ignoreLASTEXITCODE: true
pwsh: true
- task: PowerShell#2
displayName: "build solution"
inputs:
targetType: 'inline'
script: |
& 'C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio\2022\Enterprise\Common7\Tools\Launch-VsDevShell.ps1'
msbuild .\<solution>.sln
pwsh: true
- task: PowerShell#2
displayName: "create install "
inputs:
targetType: 'inline'
script: |
& 'C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio\2022\Enterprise\Common7\Tools\Launch-VsDevShell.ps1'
devenv ".\<project>.vdproj" /Build
pwsh: true