Visual Studio 2010: How to enforce build order of projects in a solution?

Question

Hey all,

I had no problem with this in Visual Studio 2008 but it seems that VS 2010 is having an issue, and I'm betting it's probably me.

I have a solution with an ASP.NET Web Site Project and a few C# projects (BLL, DAL, Tests in NUnit). I have configured the build process for the test project to automatically run NUnit to run the tests. I would like to ensure that the BLL and DAL projects build before the test project so that the tests will run against the latest compiled version (yes, I know I could do this all in one project, but I'm choosing not to -- please bear with me :) )

So, I set the dependencies of the Test project to include the BLL, DAL, and Web Application projects, and the build order shows BLL, DAL, Web Application, and then Tests. However, I noticed that the BLL doesn't actually build when I build the Test project.

Any idea what this could be or any option I might be missing to force the other projects to build when I build the Test project?

Thanks in advance for any help!

Answer 1

Hey all,

Thanks for the response -- I saw shortly after this that, yes, for my solution configuration I didn't have "build" checked, so it was skipping the projects. Switched that and now it works great.

Thanks for the quick responses!

Answer 2

I'll expound upon my comment a bit here, for those having a similar issue.

Open up the configuration manager by right clicking on the solution and choosing Configuration Manager, then make sure build is checked for the appropriate project (for your current configuration) in the right-hand column here: