sdk: 'Private' metadata is not propagated to transitive dependencies

This was discovered moving Roslyn’s VSIX projects to the new SDK.

Roslyn builds a number of VSIX projects and is very particular about which projects end up embedded in which VSIX. There are a number of patterns employed to accomplish this including

<ProjectReference Include="..\..\VisualStudio\Core\Impl\ServicesVisualStudioImpl.csproj">
  <Project>{c0e80510-4fbe-4b0c-af2c-4f473787722c}</Project>
  <Name>ServicesVisualStudioImpl</Name>
  <Private>false</Private>
</ProjectReference>

The intent here is to reference the project but not include its contents in the resulting VSIX by means of <Private>false</Private>. This continues to work in the new SDK.

However implicit transitive references ends up pulling in all of the projects that ServicesVisualStudioImpl.csproj. None of those projects are marked as <Private>false</Private> and as a result end up included in the VSIX. This both bloats (in some cases 100 fold) and functionally breaks our VSIX (some cases 100 fold).

About this issue

Original URL
State: open
Created 7 years ago
Reactions: 1
Comments: 16 (14 by maintainers)

Commits related to this issue

Disable implicit transitive references in VSIX projects By default the new SDK will cause projecs to reference the full transitive closure of project references, not just the direct references. This ... — committed to jaredpar/roslyn by jaredpar 7 years ago

Most upvoted comments

Changing title to match more general issue as #1467 stated it (marked as dupe now). The repro steps in #1467 are also very clear and should be used to construct a test case when fixing this. cc @sharwell

nguerrera on Aug 2, 2017

This is also an issue for VS for Mac.

Here are my notes, in case it’s helpful:

Right now, if project B has a private (i.e. the default) project reference to project A and project C has a non-private ref to project B, project C will transitively get a private ref to project A.

This seems very wrong, and is very much NOT what we want.

Extensions reference each other with non-private refs so we only get one copy of each dll in the app. This breaks that.

Setting PrivateAssets=“runtime,contentFiles” on the private reference does NOT fix it.

And here’s my workaround:

<Target Name="_MakeTransitiveProjectRefsNonPrivate" AfterTargets="IncludeTransitiveProjectReferences">
	<ItemGroup>
		<!-- remove the transitive project references and re-add them as non-private project references -->
		<ProjectReference Remove="@(_TransitiveProjectReferences)" />
		<ProjectReference Include="@(_TransitiveProjectReferences)" Private="False" />
	</ItemGroup>
</Target>

mhutch on Jan 17, 2019