How to make a transitive task?

[timcassell]

I created a task to run an assembly weave with Mono.Cecil in an after build target. I want this task to run on all projects that reference my project via <ProjectReference>.

From working with CoPilot, it explained that ProjectReferences cannot have transitive tasks, only PackageReferences can via .targets file. So I thought, ok, I can just use a BeforeTargets="Restore" task exec command powershell script to clear the nuget cache and build the package, and add a PackageReference to the newly built package with a local <RestoreSources>, and that will be transitive. This seems to work fine when I build my project (using dotnet build), however, when I build another project that has a ProjectReference to my project, the target doesn't run, so my script doesn't execute, and the build fails if the package didn't exist already (or doesn't have up-to-date code if it did exist).

When I ask CoPilot how to solve it, it just goes around in circles. Am I missing something, or is it just not possible? It feels so close...

[huoyaoyuan]

ProjectReference doesn't really get parity with PackageReference. It misses various features like native assets.

Publishing an intermediate NuGet package (even to local disk) could be a viable workaround.

[timcassell]

Publishing an intermediate NuGet package (even to local disk) could be a viable workaround.

Yeah, that's what I ended up doing.

It's a sub-par experience if you want to share source code and have referencing projects auto-update when the source code is changed like how project references work. Are there any plans to improve this type of workflow?

[huoyaoyuan]

Maybe it belongs to NuGet? Like NuGet/Home#6826

[timcassell]

I think more like MSBuild should have the ability to compile and run a Task from source, rather than having to target a pre-compiled dll, then having that Task source be a transitive dependency. (I can already do half of that - compile and run it from a shell script - but it can't be transitive.)

[timcassell]

Or I guess ProjectReference just needs to make more things transitive like PackageReference (I just found out that analyzers are also not transitive via ProjectReference).