Capturing The Geek

Bin deploying linked files

Enable web publishing of linked files in _bin_deployableAssemblies

Friday 16 December 2011 at 09:18 am.

If like me you don't want to have duplicate copies of your bin dependencies between your libraries/packages folder and "/_bin_deployableAssemblies" you'll want to link them; unfortunately the default Microsoft.WebApplication.targets won't publish them - absurd I know!

Through experimentation I've found the most elegant solution is to have have a custom targets files (checked into source control and branched from a common location) that I import into my web projects. It simply overrides one of the targets in Microsoft.WebApplication.targets and copies linked files to a bin sub-folder before adding them to the CreateItem collection that is later used when building/publishing.

CopyLinkedBinDeployableAssemblies.targets

<Project DefaultTargets="Build" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/developer/msbuild/2003">
  <Target Name="_CopyBinDeployableAssemblies" Condition="Exists('$(MSBuildProjectDirectory)\_bin_deployableAssemblies')">
    <Copy Condition=" '%(Content.Link)' != '' " SourceFiles="%(Content.Identity)" DestinationFiles="$(MSBuildProjectDirectory)\bin\%(Content.Link)" />
    <CreateItem Include="$(MSBuildProjectDirectory)\bin\_bin_deployableAssemblies\**\*.*" Condition="Exists('$(MSBuildProjectDirectory)\bin\_bin_deployableAssemblies')">
      <Output ItemName="_binDeployableAssemblies" TaskParameter="Include" />
    </CreateItem>
    <CreateItem Include="$(MSBuildProjectDirectory)\_bin_deployableAssemblies\**\*.*" Condition="Exists('$(MSBuildProjectDirectory)\_bin_deployableAssemblies')">
      <Output ItemName="_binDeployableAssemblies" TaskParameter="Include" />
    </CreateItem>
    <Copy SourceFiles="@(_binDeployableAssemblies)" DestinationFolder="$(OutDir)\%(RecursiveDir)" SkipUnchangedFiles="true" Retries="$(CopyRetryCount)" RetryDelayMilliseconds="$(CopyRetryDelayMilliseconds)" />
  </Target>
</Project>;

Then in my web .csproj project file add an import link to the new targets file;

<Import Project="$(MSBuildProjectDirectory)\..\..\BuildSupport\Targets\CopyLinkedBinDeployableAssemblies.targets" />

Important! Make sure you put this after the Import to Microsoft.WebApplication.targets.

Finally...

There seems to be a myth that _bin_deployableAssemblies is MVC3 only which of course is utter tosh, this works for any project that uses Microsoft.WebApplication.targets; I know this as we use it in our FubuMVC projects to copy Simple.Data MEF dependencies

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