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brentspell
Warning on referenced projects
NuBuild show a warning symbol on all referenced projects (yellow triangle with !). In the error list there are no warnings or messages. The reference projects are included in the package. What does the warning mean?
I don't see the warning symbols in the project tree in my installation. I assume that you are seeing it in all projects in the NuBuild solution. Are you using Visual Studio 2010 or 2012? Also, have you installed the Visual Studio 2010 SP1 SDK and WiX 3.6+?
I am not near the machine I tested it on, but I the project was in VS2010, most likely with the SDK, but maybe not the SP1 version. It has WiX 3.6 or 3.7. But it was not to build NuBuild, it is in using the extension. Are Visual Studio 2010 SP1 SDK and WiX 3.6+ prerequisites for that? May become tricky if you only have VS2012. Let me do some more testing on my home machine.
I see. No, you don't need the VS SDK or WiX to build any projects that use the extension. I also noticed the exclamation sign in the project references in one of the sample projects. It is not clear what is causing the warning, but it does not appear to affect the build output. I will take a look at it and see if there is something that can be done.
We had also yellow exclamations when referring library projects from NuBuild projects (2.x, project flavor based version, but this project file structure is the same in v1.x and v2.x) and also when referring other NuBuild projects from NuBuild projects (for automatic dependency calculation). Our yellow exclamations seem to be a VS "feature": VS tries to validate, that only binary projects refers each other.
The solution was that (VS2010 and VS2012 tested) to add <Import Project="$(MSBuildToolsPath)\Microsoft.Common.targets" /> BEFORE <Import Project="$(MSBuildExtensionsPath32)\NuBuild\v1\NuBuild.targets" />. When VS calls some special target in the project to determine some properties of it, VS IDE will think that the NuBuild project is a binary project. It has a side-effect: sometimes a "The target "CoreCompile" does not exist in the project." warning is shown on the NuBuild project and later this disappears. I had no time to resolve this side-effect. I've tried to add several properties with constant values to the NuBuild project file to trick VS, but nothing helped to hide the exclamation marks, I've tried to debug the build process to determine the required properties, no result, I finally gave up and stick with the Microsoft.Common.targets import.
