I have a fairly large solution with several projects and multiple deployment projects (VDPROJ). I am in the process of automating builds using MSBUILD. I am aware of the limitation where I need to invoke Visual Studio (VS) in order to build the VDPROJ. I cannot switch to WiX at this time.
Currently I have a EXE task in my build script that invokes a VS and builds the VDPROJ. This works fine. The problem is that it has to open/close the solution for each VDPROJ which takes too much time. I want to speed up this process.
I thought about just having a solution with the VDPROJ and building that but I then have to include the references to the other CSPROJ files and their references because the "Project Output" dialog only displays referenced projects. I don't want to have to manually include output files as since I want the VDPROJ files to automatically see any changes that are made to the CSPROJ.
Using a VDPROJ is there a way to reference a project output that is not in the current solution?
Are there any ways to speed up this build process without a ton of extra overhead of breaking up the solution into smaller solutions?