Skip to main content

Visual Studio: Reference a different DLL depending on your build configuration

For a Windows 8 application we are building, we have to deploy versions that connect to different backends. We could have created different branches  but this would result in lots of merges. Instead we decided to go for a provider model combined with conditional compilation symbols. This allows us to easily switch between providers by changing the build configuration.
This brought us half way there but we had still an issue because we also had to use a different 3th party component depending on the backend. So what we actually want is that when setting the build configuration to QA, the 3thparty.component.QA winmd file was loaded and if we switch to Production the 3thparty.component.Production winmd file was loaded.
This is perfectly possible by changing the project file and editing the underlying MSBuild settings:
  • Unload the project.
  • Choose Edit project and open it using the XML editor.
  • Find the reference to the component you want to change depending on the build configuration.
<Reference Include="3thPartyComponent">
 <HintPath>..\packages\3thPartyComponentQA\lib\winrt45\3thparty.component.QA.winmd</HintPath>
</Reference>

  • Duplicate the reference for each build configuration you want to support.
<Reference Include="3thPartyComponent">
 <HintPath>..\packages\3thPartyComponentQA\lib\winrt45\3thparty.component.QA.winmd</HintPath>
</Reference>
<Reference Include="3thPartyComponent">
 <HintPath>..\packages\3thPartyComponentProduction\lib\winrt45\3thparty.component.Production.winmd</HintPath>
</Reference>

  • Apply a conditional to the Reference elements.

<Reference Include="3thPartyComponent" Condition="'$(Configuration)'=='QA'">
 <HintPath>..\packages\3thPartyComponentQA\lib\winrt45\3thparty.component.QA.winmd</HintPath>
</Reference>
<Reference Include="3thPartyComponent" Condition="'$(Configuration)'=='Production'">
 <HintPath>..\packages\3thPartyComponentProduction\lib\winrt45\3thparty.component.Production.winmd</HintPath>
</Reference>

Popular posts from this blog

DevToys–A swiss army knife for developers

As a developer there are a lot of small tasks you need to do as part of your coding, debugging and testing activities.  DevToys is an offline windows app that tries to help you with these tasks. Instead of using different websites you get a fully offline experience offering help for a large list of tasks. Many tools are available. Here is the current list: Converters JSON <> YAML Timestamp Number Base Cron Parser Encoders / Decoders HTML URL Base64 Text & Image GZip JWT Decoder Formatters JSON SQL XML Generators Hash (MD5, SHA1, SHA256, SHA512) UUID 1 and 4 Lorem Ipsum Checksum Text Escape / Unescape Inspector & Case Converter Regex Tester Text Comparer XML Validator Markdown Preview Graphic Color B

Help! I accidently enabled HSTS–on localhost

I ran into an issue after accidently enabling HSTS for a website on localhost. This was not an issue for the original website that was running in IIS and had a certificate configured. But when I tried to run an Angular app a little bit later on http://localhost:4200 the browser redirected me immediately to https://localhost . Whoops! That was not what I wanted in this case. To fix it, you need to go the network settings of your browser, there are available at: chrome://net-internals/#hsts edge://net-internals/#hsts brave://net-internals/#hsts Enter ‘localhost’ in the domain textbox under the Delete domain security policies section and hit Delete . That should do the trick…

Azure DevOps/ GitHub emoji

I’m really bad at remembering emoji’s. So here is cheat sheet with all emoji’s that can be used in tools that support the github emoji markdown markup: All credits go to rcaviers who created this list.