Project layout for small, shared C# classes

Question

I'm writing plugins (i.e. .Net 4 libraries with a special entry point) for a .Net framework application, but I also want to expose the functionality as self-contained CLI executable.

The current directory layout looks like this:

Directory.build.props // shared configuration, e.g. author name, project name
FooPlugin/FooPlugin.cs
Foo/FooPlugin/FooPlugin.csproj
Foo/FooLib/FooLib.cs
Foo/FooLib/FooLib.csproj
Foo/FooExe/FooExe.cs
Foo/FooExe/FooExe.csproj
Bar/BarPlugin/…

FooLib is a .Net Standard 2.0 library with the entire functionality in FooLib.cs, FooPlugin is a .Net 4.8 library with the entry point for the plugin FooPlugin.cs and FooExe is a .Net Core executable with a CLI wrapper for FooLib in FooExe.cs. So far, so good.

I have two major problems with this approach:

1. FooPlugin depends on several application specific Windows-only assemblies so I can't just dotnet build from the root directory, because msbuild tries to build FooPlugin as well and I haven't figured out how to conditionally exclude subprojects from the solution file.

2. Each plugin (and CLI app) has two files (FooPlugin.dll and FooLib.dll / FooExe.dll and FooLib.dll) which in itself isn't that bad, but my users ignore FooLib.dlland then complain.ILMerge` looks promising, but its configuration is a lot more complicated than the entire remaining build configuration combined.

In CMake, I'd just write

add_library(FooLib STATIC FooLib.cpp)
add_library(FooPlugin SHARED FooPlugin.cpp)
target_link_libraries(FooPlugin PRIVATE FooLib)
add_executable(FooExe SHARED FooExe.cpp)
target_link_libraries(FooExe PRIVATE FooLib)

and have FooLib merged into both FooPlugin.dll and FooExe.exe.

I already thought about putting symlinks to the (few) source files in FooLib into FooPlugin and FooExe, but the support for symlinks on Windows isn't that good yet.

Can I define targets in msbuild to be merged into assemblies automatically?

Answer 1

A fairly trivial solution would be to just create multiple solution files that each contain some of the projects.

For a more competent solution I would take a look at Cake or Fake. I have used neither, but they seem to be the most popular build systems on the .net platform.

You can also use the target switch for msBuild to build a specific project in a solution.