Reading the list of References from csproj files

Question

Does anyone know of a way to programmatically read the list of References in a VS2008 csproj file? MSBuild does not appear to support this functionality. I'm trying to read the nodes by loading the csproj file into an XmlDocument but, the XPath search does not return any nodes. I'm using the following code:

System.Xml.XmlDocument projDefinition = new System.Xml.XmlDocument();
        projDefinition.Load(fullProjectPath);

        System.Xml.XPath.XPathNavigator navigator = projDefinition.CreateNavigator();

        System.Xml.XPath.XPathNodeIterator iterator = navigator.Select(@"/Project/ItemGroup");
        while (iterator.MoveNext())
        {
            Console.WriteLine(iterator.Current.Name);
        }

If I can get the list of ItemGroups I can determine whether it contains Reference information or not.

Thank you for your help.

Answer 1

The XPath should be /Project/ItemGroup/Reference, and you have forgot the namespace. I'd just use XLINQ - dealing with namespaces in XPathNavigator is rather messy. So:

    XNamespace msbuild = "http://schemas.microsoft.com/developer/msbuild/2003";
    XDocument projDefinition = XDocument.Load(fullProjectPath);
    IEnumerable<string> references = projDefinition
        .Element(msbuild + "Project")
        .Elements(msbuild + "ItemGroup")
        .Elements(msbuild + "Reference")
        .Select(refElem => refElem.Value);
    foreach (string reference in references)
    {
        Console.WriteLine(reference);
    }