Xamarin & .NET Developer Events in August
I’ve been doing quite a bit of WiX work lately. One thing that is veryconvenient in WiX is the ability to reference metadata about projectreferences directly from your WiX files (i.e. fragments or includes). Youcould, for example, include a file from a project reference easily with:
<File Id="MyFile" Source="$(var.MyReference.TargetDir)MyFile.dll" />WiX has a task that automatically fetches metadata about project referencesand turns them into those vars you can use, which are then passed to therest of the WiX compile process (candle, light, what-not). The resultingcommand-line for those tools end up looking something like:
candle.exe ... -dMyReference.Configuration=Debug -d"MyReference.FullConfiguration=Debug|x86" -dMyReference.Platform=x86 -dMyReference.ProjectExt=.csproj -dMyReference.ProjectFileName=MyReference.csproj -dMyReference.ProjectName=MyReference -dMyReference.TargetDir=[FULL_PATH_HERE]MyReferencebinDebug -dMyReference.TargetExt=.dll -dMyReference.TargetFileName=MyReference.dll -dMyReference.TargetName=MyReference ...If you’re doing some pre-processing of the project reference, includingsome of its output as compile contents or what-not, it would be veryuseful to access those values from MSBuild. This is one of those caseswhere you wish WiX’s MSBuild integration went a bit further, but fortunatelyit’s all just plain MSBuild in the end so we can do whatever we want tomake it better. In this case, the target that adds those project referencevars is called AddCompilerDefineConstants and has a convenientAddCompilerDefineConstantsDependsOn property which we can extend as follows:
<PropertyGroup> <AddCompilerDefineConstantsDependsOn> $(AddCompilerDefineConstantsDependsOn); AddProjectReferenceMetadata </AddCompilerDefineConstantsDependsOn></PropertyGroup>And the new AddProjectReferenceMetadata will create an item (“group” ofjust one item) named MyReference that I can then use as:
<ItemGroup> <Compile Include="%(MyReference.TargetDir)*.wxs" /></ItemGroup>That would bring in all the .wxs files that are in the output directoryof the referenced project, for example.
Here’s the AddProjectReferenceMetadata target:
<Target Name="AddProjectReferenceMetadata"> <!-- Fist invoke the built-in task, but retrieve the outputs as items rather than a single property, which is what the built-in targets do --> <CreateProjectReferenceDefineConstants ProjectReferencePaths="@(_ResolvedProjectReferencePaths)" ProjectConfigurations="$(VSProjectConfigurations)"> <Output TaskParameter="DefineConstants" ItemName="_ProjectReferenceConstants" /> </CreateProjectReferenceDefineConstants> <ItemGroup> <!-- Via a cascading item metadata process, we determine the index of the first '.' in the project constants retrieved by the task, since we want to use that as the grouping 'ReferenceName' item name instead. --> <_ProjectReferenceConstants> <!-- Note how we create a new string with static method syntax, to be able to use property function syntax with item metadata --> <ReferenceName>$([System.String]::new('%(Identity)').Substring(0, $([System.String]::new('%(Identity)').IndexOf('.'))))</ReferenceName> <ReferenceStart>$([System.String]::new('%(Identity)').IndexOf('.'))</ReferenceStart> </_ProjectReferenceConstants> <_ProjectReferenceConstants> <!-- The we actually need to add 1 to the index of the dot for the substring. For better readability, we do it in two steps, saving the value above, and then calling the built-in Add function here, which updates the metadata value. --> <ReferenceStart>$([MSBuild]::Add(%(ReferenceStart), 1))</ReferenceStart> </_ProjectReferenceConstants> <!-- Here we change the item name on purpose, to drop all the items that have the reference name prefix intentionally. Note that since we're creating a new item group, we need to reference the original ones by their full item.metadata name. --> <ProjectReferenceMetadata Include="@(_ProjectReferenceConstants -> '$([System.String]::new('%(_ProjectReferenceConstants.Identity)').Substring(%(_ProjectReferenceConstants.ReferenceStart)))')"> <ReferenceName>%(_ProjectReferenceConstants.ReferenceName)</ReferenceName> </ProjectReferenceMetadata> </ItemGroup> <!-- Finally, create a new item group with the name of the reference, which leverages task batching and automatically groups the ProjectReferenceMetadata group by their reference name --> <CreateItem Include="%(ProjectReferenceMetadata.ReferenceName)" AdditionalMetadata="@(ProjectReferenceMetadata)"> <Output TaskParameter="Include" ItemName="%(ProjectReferenceMetadata.ReferenceName)"/> </CreateItem></Target>Related posts
