I want to build universal app for release on the store i.e. generating the *.appxupload (building the *.appx to deploy on my machine is fine; have to remove the default /p:AppxBundle=Always though and cannot build Win32: no matter what I do, it always builds ARM). But I cannot get it to work at all following Microsoft's instructions i.e. adding /p:UapAppxPackageBuildMode=CI.
The system simply stops with
Error MSB4126: The specified solution configuration "Release|x86" is invalid. Please specify a valid solution configuration using the Configuration and Platform properties (e.g. MSBuild.exe Solution.sln /p:Configuration=Debug /p:Platform="Any CPU") or leave those properties blank to use the default solution configuration.
My project has obviously an Release|x86 configuration. And it reports this while building ARM release. I tried changing x86 to Win32 but it then report
APPX0502: File 'C:\a\1\s\AppName\BundleArtifacts\Win32.txt' not found. [C:\a\1\s\AppName\AppName.vcxproj]
EDIT: Apparently, I have to manually set the Project to Win32 for it to build x86 release. Previously, it was left blank (and the automatic build configuration generator also leaves it blank).
Update the argument to:
/p:UapAppxPackageBuildMode=StoreUpload
And then queue the build, you should get the appxupload file.
Refer to this link for details: Windows Store app projects stopped generating the .appxupload file.
Similar question here: VSTS build for UWP app not producing a .appxupload file.
Related
I recently installed the preview version of visual studio and created a new .net maui blazor hybrid app.
When debugging the app, a window shows up and everything works just as expected.
However when i go to the bin folder and run the exe that is located there the window does not come up.
In the windows event logs i can see the following:
Exception Info: System.DllNotFoundException: Unable to load DLL 'Microsoft.ui.xaml.dll' or one of its dependencies
And indeed that dll is missing from the bin folder.
What does visual studio do to make this work? How can i just run the exe?
Right now we only support so-called “packaged” apps. Those you need to publish to an MSIX and install in order to run.
We’re working on adding the unpackaged scenario as well, you can track that here: https://github.com/dotnet/maui/issues/3166
While searching for the above issue I noticed a couple of others ones though. According to this and this it might already be possible right now, you might want to try!
We use VS 2017 and consume NuGet packages the old way. We do not use PackageReference as of yet.
When a NuGet package reference is updated through the NuGet Manager in VS, the respective assembly binding redirect is not updated automatically - we have to do it manually.
So, I suppose it is up to the package to take care of it through the tools\install.ps1 script. Now, I think I know how to implement it, but I do not want to invent the wheel. Surely the code already exists somewhere, but where?
Clarification
Our application is strongly signed and it targets .NET 4.5.2 currently (soon to be upgraded to 4.7.2). We use packages.config.
I need to explain what is going on. There are three players on the field:
A tool - DbUpgrade
The tool plugin Api - DbUpgradeApi
An implementation of the plugin Api - LogDbUpgradeProgress
Let us inspect the DbUpgradeApi package. 3 versions of it are relevant to us:
The version against which LogDbUpgradeProgress is compiled - A
The version against which DbUpgrade is compiled - B
The latest version of DbUpgradeApi - C
The DbUpgrade tool loads the plugin LogDbUpgradeProgress at runtime. The binding redirects are needed, because A is not the same as B (and because the code is signed, nothing to do here currently)
If C is higher than B, then we should update the reference to DbUpgradeApi in DbUpgrade. But doing so must be accompanied with updating the binding redirect. And this is the essence of this question.
Ok, so I just spent the last hour testing, and I didn't need to do anything that I consider special for binding redirects to work.
But first, are you sure you need binding redirects? .NET Core doesn't need it. If you're using .NET Framework, but with a project using PackageReference, then it's resolved at build time, your app.config doesn't need the binding redirect in the version that's checked in with your code, but when you build and check the [your exe name].config file it does have the binding redirects. Also, binding redirects only matter when your assembly has strong naming. If you didn't sign your assembly, then binding redirect isn't needed.
Here are the steps that I took to create a reproduction of getting binding redirects in a console app using packages.config.
Create an empty folder to start with. I used dotnet new sln, dotnet net nugetconfig to generate a new sln and nuget.config file. I edited the nuget.config file to add the folder localFeed as a source, and set the globalPackagesFolder to gpf so I didn't pollute my real global packages folder with test packages. Also created a strong name key with sn -k snk.snk.
Create first test classlib. dotnet new classlib -n someLib. I edited Class1.cs to change the class name to SomeClass and added a property that retusns the value "Version 1". Used Visual Studio to set snk.snk as the signing key. dotnet pack to generate V1 of the package. I then edited SomeClass to change the message to "Version 2" and then ran dotnet pack /p:version=2.0.0. Finally, used nuget.exe add -source localFeed someLib\bin\Debug\someLib.1.0.0.nupkg and again for v2 of the nupkg.
Create the second test classlib, dotnet new classlib -n anotherLib and set the signing key to snk.snk. Changed Class1.cs to AnotherClass and added a property public string Message => new someLib.SomeClass().Message;. Added a reference to someLib version 1 in the csproj, then built, packed and used nuget.exe to add the nupkg to localFeed.
Opened Visual Studio and created a .NET Framework console app. Added a reference to anotherLib, which automatically brought in v1 of someLib. Upgraded the reference of someLib to v2, and confirmed that packages.config now has a binding redirect for someLib.
Created another .NET Framework console app and did the same as step 3, but this time using PackageReference instead of packages.config. The project app.config doesn't have binding redirects, but the .config file in the bin folder after build does.
edit: perhaps an important part to understanding NuGet/MSBuild binding redirect behaviour is the following: In both steps 3 and 4, if I add a reference only to anotherLib, then no binding redirect is created because all assembles that reference someLib reference the same version. Only by making my console app reference a different version of someLib than anotherLib uses, then the binding redirect is created.
In an app with plugins, the building the app assembly won't have a binding redirect, because it's the only assembly in the compile command line that uses the plugin contract dll, so no conflict to need a binding redirect. When the plugin assembly is built, only the plugin depends on the plugin contract dll, so again no conflict so no binding redirect. If you copy all the dlls into a single folder, then there can be a conflict in the required version, but this is a deployment time issue, not a build/compile time issue, so build tools may not help. One way to resolve this would be to add a reference to the plugin project from the app assembly. This way at compile time the build tools can see that two different versions of the plugin contract dll is used, so a binding redirect can be created. This only works if you build the app assembly. If the app is just a binary that you're given, then changing the binding redirects becomes a deployment time responsibility, so development/build tools may not help.
I'm using Visual Studio Online's build tools to deploy web applications from a single solution. I've occasionally been running into file locking issues.
Error: Web Deploy cannot modify the file 'Microsoft.CodeAnalysis.CSharp.dll' on the destination because it is locked by an external process.
After some Googling, I believe the "fix" is to stop the web applications before deployment on Azure and start it back up after. Sounds legit.
However, there does not seem to be a straight forward way to do this directly on VSO's build definitions. I've created an "Azure Powershell" build task, but it wants a PS1 file from the repository. It doesn't seem to let me just run Azure Powershell commands (e.g. Stop-AzureWebsite) from here. My team has created a work-around where we have a "run.ps1" that just executes the command you pass as a parameter, but none of us are satisfied by that.
What are we missing? There has got to be an easier way to do this without having a PS1 script checked into source control.
I solved this by installing Azure App Services - Start and Stop extension from Visual Studio Marketplace.
When installed, it will allow you to wrap the Deploy Website to Azure task in your Release definition with Azure AppServices Stop and Azure AppServices Start tasks, effectively eliminating the lock issues.
Check if you are using "/" on the "Web Deploy Package" path for folder separators instead of "\".
i.e. change
$(System.DefaultWorkingDirectory)/My Project/drop/MyFolder/MyFile.zip
for
$(System.DefaultWorkingDirectory)\My Project\drop\MyFolder\MyFile.zip
I noticed that was the only difference between the one I was getting the error and the others (the Restart step I added was not helping). Once I modified the path, I got it working.
Sounds crappy, but fixed my issue.
Did you use the Build Deployment Template that sets the correct msbuild parameters for you for your package? You can see how here. I would create a build using that template and see if you have the same issues. If so ping me on Twitter #DonovanBrown and I will see if I can figure what is going on.
As a rule it is good practice to have any scripts or commands required to deploy your software to be checked into source control as part of your build. They can then be easily run repeatedly with little configuration at the build level. This provides consistency and transparency.
Even better is to have deployment scripts output as part of the build and use a Release Management tool to control the actual deployment.
Regardless having configuration as code is a mantra that all Dev and Ops teams should live by.
In TFS post build script of a .proj file I want to find whether the project build is happening through TFS triggered build or manually triggered build.
Can someone suggest me how to do this using macros in Post Build event.
Short answer: you can make use of the IsDesktopBuild MSBUILD property within your csproj file to differentiate between TFS and local build.
Long Answer:
Developer or Team Build?
To differentiate the build environments we have to implement a mechanism that detects in which environment the build is being executed. In other words, we need to know if we running a local build that is executed by the developer or a team build running on the build server.
In fact, there are 3 different build environments we need to consider:
· Visual Studio Build – a build executed by a developer, on their own development machine inside the Visual Studio IDE
· Team Build – a build executed by TFS (manually or scheduled), on the build.
· Desktop Build – a build explicitly executed manually, on the development workstation using the command 'msbuild.exe tfsbuild.proj'.
A ‘DesktopBuild’ and a ‘TeamBuild’ are very similar in nature except that ‘DesktopBuild’ does not perform a ‘GetLatest’ function from source repository, will not ‘Label’ the source tree and will not determine the change set.
When using MSBUILD tasks (as we will use primarily in following sections), one common way to achieve this is to use the ‘IsDesktopBuild’ and ‘BuildingSolutionFile’ properties as conditions to test in the tasks.The ‘IsDesktopBuild’ property is declared in the ‘Microsoft.TeamFoundationBuild.targets’. The ‘BuildingSolutionFile’ property is declared and assigned automatically by MSBUILD.
The following table lists the values of each of these properties in each of the build environments.
Environment IsDesktopBuild BuildingSolutionFile
Visual Studio Build (empty) (empty)
Desktop Build true true
Team Build false true
One caveat with using the ‘IsDesktopBuild’ property is that it is not defined in many target files by default. This property will have an ‘empty’ value in a Visual Studio build, so we initialize it to a value of ‘true’ as the default value. Therefore we need to be explicitly define it in all MSBUILD target files where it will be tested.
We simply add the following element to all target files where we need to differentiate between a build on the development machine and a build on the build server (within the first section).
<IsDesktopBuild Condition="'$(IsDesktopBuild)' == ''">true</IsDesktopBuild>
Update: thank you #dbardakov. Starting VS 2012 we can use the property to find if the build is happening within Visual Studio:
BuildingInsideVisualStudio
MSDN SOURCE - for BuildingInsideVisualStudio
MSDN SOURCE
I am learning TFS 2010 from scratch and no doubt making every mistake in the book.
I have created a web.testing.config for my build to the test server.
In my build process I click the plus sign for "Items to Build" in "1. Required" and I specify "Any CPU | Testing".
The build clean compiles but ... I still seem to be using the web.config file I use in development rather than the one I want in testing.
The first line in web.testing.config is
This should ensure that any differences in this file are implemented.
So I am not sure I am configuring the build properly, or if the web.testing.config is set properly.
What you are looking for is a feature called web.config transforms, and it works slightly differently.
In Visual Studio right click on web.config and choose option Create Tranforms -- if you have not done this already.
Read samples on using tranform syntax, the link is in the web..config created for you. You will need it.
In TFS team build, create a separate step in your build template to build deployment package. The command is in this thread. This will create a deployment package -- a file with .zip extension.
To deploy the package, use WebDeploy tool. It has both UI and command line if you want to make it completely automated.