I have a #if in a project that depends on which build configuration is selected (eg: Debug, QA, and other test environments). When a user changes the build configuration in VS2015/Xamarin Studio, I need the IDE to force a rebuild on this project when the user builds the solution. How do I do this? At the moment, rebuilding the solution will reuse the compiled dll's.
In other words, how do I set a project dirty after a user changes the build configuration to force a rebuild.
Make sure the Output path of the project is unique to the build configuration. Otherwise MsBuild will just compare the timestamp of the input files and the existing output files and will conclude that a rebuild is not required.
It is assumed that when two projects build a different configuration, that they also write to a different folder for this reason.
Normally the output location is set to .\bin\$(configuration) to ensure this is the default behavior.
Related
I want to build a project with a particular named Build Configuration, let's call it Conf-A.
This is running as an MSBuild step on TeamCity. When the build runs, it spits out:
The OutputPath property is not set for project ... You may be seeing this message because you are trying to build a project without a solution file, and have specified a non-default Configuration or Platform that doesn't exist for this project.
This project is part of a hulking great solution we load on our dev machines.
The error makes sense for my situation, since I'm building just the proj file, but I don't want to use the solution file since I'm trying break-up this monolithic app.
I want the build-server to treat this project as it's own component, even if for the moment it is part of a solution and has references to other projects (assemblies) in the solution.
Must I build this via a solution file?
I could potentially copy the solution file and prune off all the other projects that are not required, but that's more complexity.
(Maybe the error is a red-herring).
you dont need to build a sln. Its like the error says. You just havent specified a value for the variable OutputPath in your msbuild. You can add it to your files or you can pass it in at the cmd line - msbuild someproj.proj /p:OutputPath=C:\notallovermydrive
I am trying to exclude certain files/folders from deployment of a web project in Visual Studio Online to an Azure website.
The web project has a Content folder with CSS, JS, build scripts and so on, which are only necessary for development, once deployed to Azure the CSS and JS is loaded from a CDN. Currently the build from VSO is copying all those files to the webroot in Azure, which is unnecessary and a potential security issue in case of the build scripts.
Now I know this can be prevented by setting the build action of a file to None, but this a very tedious solution because there is a lot of development going on, new files get added all the time and it is easy to forget this setting.
First I tried setting the Content folder to Cloaked in the build definitions source settings, but this only causes VSO to not download this folder on build, msbuild will still complain that those files are missing.
Is there a way to tell msbuild to ignore the whole Content folder? I already tried adding /p:ExcludeFoldersFromDeployment="Content" as a msbuild argument in the build definition, and also tried the solutions in here How to get Visual Studio 'Publish' functionality to include files from post build event?, but nothing is working.
I was studying msbuild log files and came up with a solution that is good enough for us to work with.
The first thing I learned was that I cannot prevent msbuild from copying files with build action Content to the output directory, at least not without changing the Microsoft.WebApplication.targets file, which I didn't want to do and am not even sure is possible with VSO build.
Anyway because of this we cannot set the source settings of our Content folder to Cloaked in the build definition, since this will cause the build to fail.
What we ended up doing was described in this answer: https://stackoverflow.com/a/3140349/1230302
So by adding the ExcludeFoldersFromDeployment statement to the .csproj file, the Content folder is excluded from the webroot.
<PropertyGroup Condition="'$(Configuration)|$(Platform)' == 'Release|AnyCPU'">
<OutputPath>bin\</OutputPath>
<ExcludeFoldersFromDeployment>Content</ExcludeFoldersFromDeployment>
</PropertyGroup>
It is not an ideal solution, but at least this way nothing gets deployed if a developer forgets to set the build action to None.
The built in continuous delivery options are designed for convenience. Of you need something custom, like skipping deployment of files that have not changed, then you will need to write something yourself.
You can easily call PowerShell to complete any task from the build process.
If you'd like to customize your build as part of the VSO build system, you can just override your BuildTemplate.xaml file.
Visual Studio Build uses Windows Workflow (xaml) to make a workflow on what the build is supposed to do. You can edit this file and do any modifications to the directory structure before or after the build.
Here is an example.
I have a project in IntelliJ IDEA, inside that a couple of modules and one of my modules has two build configurations. One of them needs to copy a <projectroot>/tools folder to its out/production/<BuildConfigurationName> folder. Can IDEA somehow automate this?
The accepted answer above is incorrect. IDEA can do this (without ant/gradle) via the artifacts system (accessed via Build menu or project settings). Any one artifact job copies multiple files/folders/build outputs to a chosen location (optionally jarred) and can be set to automatically run on make.
Artifacts can even be chained, i.e. output from one as input to another.
Can IDEA somehow automate this?
Not directly, no. Ultimately IDEA is an IDE and not a build tool. While it can do a lot during a build, it does not have the ability to copy non-source files to an alternate directory, let alone a dynamically named directory.
If you marked the tools directory as a source directory (and none of its contained file types were set in the "Ignore files and folder" setting at the bottom of the "File Types" settings dialog), IDEA would then copy the tools directory to the out directory. But renaming requires a more sophisticated build tool.
Ultimately, the "ideal" or "best practices" solution would be to build your project using a build tool like Maven, Gradle or Ant for which this type of thing would be a snap.
If that is not an option, or for some reason you really want IDEA to do the build, the best thing you could do is to write a simple Ant script to the copy for you. (Or possibly Gradle, I do not have much experience with Gradle yet. Maven could do it, but it'd be a bit cumbersome compared to Ant.) In any Run/Debug configurations, you can define the ant script target to run before or after the IDEA "make" in the Before Launch section. (You can set that as a default for any newly created configurations by configuring it in Defaults on the left). If you run your build manually, you can assign a shortcut to the ant build and then run it and the make in sequence. Alternatively, you could record a Macro (Edit > Macros) to run both in sequence and then (optionally) assign the macro a keyboard shortcut.
I have an automated build process set up to run from a build definition in TFS, which publishes a web application and generates/executes a database project script successfully via publish profiles that are passed as msbuild arguments in the build process definition. Everything is now running as expected except that several unnecessary files are being deployed to the target folder, including the .csproj file, all of the config transforms, and the properties folder which contains all of my publish profiles.
This is strange because 1. It's definitely not including ALL files/folders and mostly appears to be including ones used by the publish profile like transforms, while applying the transform correctly and excluding any explicitly excluded file (as defined in the pubxml), and 2. The process works perfectly if I do it by publishing from the project in Visual Studio 2013. I have the profile configured to only include files needed by the application, and I've confirmed in the csproj file that this property is there.
I tried excluding the properties folder from deployment in the pubxml file, but this causes the build to crash because it can't find the assembly file. What I've gathered is that the process is keeping all files it needs to complete the build, and dropping all of those files in my destination folder. FWIW, I'm using the "file system" method and I'm not sure yet if web deploy will make a difference. I haven't been able yet to connect to the target server with web deploy, but that's a separate problem to solve. Is there something in the build that I can configure so that my destination folder has only the files it needs to run the application, and not the files needed to BUILD the application?
FYI I also have not been using a drop folder, I'm not sure if that makes a difference or not but that might be the only thing I haven't tested as it doesn't seem necessary since I'm using a publishprofile and don't want to use the default tfs build configuration.
I found a solution that works well enough, after reading this: http://www.asp.net/web-forms/tutorials/deployment/advanced-enterprise-web-deployment/excluding-files-and-folders-from-deployment
This was a little uglier solution than I wanted, since it requires hard-coding the names of excluded files, but it does the trick and only requires identifying the files and folders in one location instead of altering a publish profile for each target environment. I created a wpp.targets file and used the ExcludeFromPackageFolders and ExcludeFromPackageFiles elements to identify the extra files. Ironically, if I don't also name the wpp.targets file in the exclude element, THAT file is included in my package. It's possible MSDeploy doesn't have the same issues with TFS as filesystem, but after spending half a day trying to work through a different set of issues and permissions workarounds, we decided that file system is a cleaner publishing method.
I have just set up three different configurations in my project for debug preview and release. No in Xcode there is an option to specify different .xconfig files per configuration. I am now wondering in what circumstances they should/could be used and what their advantages are over just editing the build settings per configuration.
Use xcconfig files if you find yourself changing the same build settings for each project you create. Place the build settings you're changing in the xcconfig file. By using a xcconfig file you can avoid editing those build settings every time you create a project.
Having the option to use different xcconfig files for each build configuration allows you to place the debug build settings you're constantly changing in one xcconfig file and place the release build settings you're changing in another xcconfig file. Use multiple xcconfig files if the build settings you're changing have different values for debug and release builds or if you change some build settings only for debug builds and other build settings only for release builds.
It's not me who you asked about an example #Besi but I would like to explain why the BundleId change is useful at least for me.
When I have different requirements for "Development", "Ad Hoc", "App Store", for example I need to send Push Notifications, so the push certificate will be different depending on the version.
In this case I can make 3 different XCode schemes and depending on the chosen scheme, when compiling the bundle identifier will change so a different kind of version will result.
Add to this the fact you can use you xcconfig to choose the "Code Sign Identity", and practically every build setting you can imagine. This way is more correct than having different targets for each version and with different plist files and build settings, because you avoid duplication and you can customize the way the settings should override each other.
Sorry if this is very convoluted, I tried responding the original question in the process.
One way I've used xcconfig files is to set up different BundleId's for iPhone apps. That way you can have different apps with different features/servers enabled. Very helpful. It involves using a variable name for the BundleId.