Continuous integration and handling project references

Question

I have decided to start using Team City as my continuous integration software and I am having some problems how I should handle my project references as the assemblies my projects depends upon are located at different locations in my developer solutions and the solutions in team city (I am using the vs2008 solution files option for the builds in team city). The problem is that the projects builds in development and fails in team city.

How should I handle the different project references in the project files?

ex. My MVC app references a common util assembly I use in other projects as well. In my developer solution I add this project to the solution but I do not want this in team city build so I have a different solution file there.

Answer 1

It sounds like you should split your code up into multiple solutions. When projects in one solution need to access binaries from projects in another solution, then they should not add those foreign projects into the solution. Instead of using project refrences, use file references.

This means that you need to deploy the results of completed builds to some common location, posisbly a share.

See patterns & practices: Visual Studio 2005 Team System Guidance. It's for TFS and 2005, butthe general concepts apply to many other source control systems.