Cruise Control .NET ignoring project dependencies.

Question

Hi. I have been using CC.Net successfully for some time, but now I have a problem. I added new solution to CC. It is compiled fine in VS2008, but fails in CC. The main reason is - projects in solution are built in wrong order, with no regard to dependencies. CC just tries to build them in the same order as they are stored on disc (alphabetical order). For example, in solution there is proect Proj1 and Proj2, Proj1 has reference to Proj2. On CCNET Proj1 is built before Proj2 and throws error "CSC : error CS0006: Metadata file 'D:\xxx\Proj2\bin\Debug\Proj2.dll' could not be found". I know this could happen when devenv is used to build solutions, but I use MSBuild. The following code is responsible for building:

<exec>
    <executable>C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v3.5\MSBuild.exe</executable>
    <baseDirectory>code\src</baseDirectory>
    <buildArgs>/p:Configuration=Debug /t:Rebuild PM.sln</buildArgs>
    <buildTimeoutSeconds>1200</buildTimeoutSeconds>
</exec>

What am I doing wrong?

Answer 1

The error Metadata file could not be found: When it happened to me, it was because there was a file called proj1.exe at that location that should not have been there. So when it used proj1.exe as the reference (instead of a proj1.dll), proj1.exe's reference to a local System.EnterpriseServices.dll failed. This was happening to me with proj1.exe referencing System.EnterpriseServices.dll which referenced System.EnterpriseServices.Wrapper.dll. Where proj1.exe was not supposed to be included in the build but someone had named a unit test app project against our team conventions.

So I recommend checking the references in the project files(unload project and edit project in vs2010 or open each project file with a text or xml editor) to make sure they are ProjectReference not Reference. Also try doing the build with /v:d in the buildArgs list so you get a more detailed build log that will show you where files were resolved to and in what order. Aa different reference that is 'successfully' resolved could be attempting to load x.dll that directly locally references your D:\xxx\Proj2\bin\Debug\Proj2.dll but fails.