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>
Labels:

Popular posts from this blog

Podman– Command execution failed with exit code 125

After updating WSL on one of the developer machines, Podman failed to work. When we took a look through Podman Desktop, we noticed that Podman had stopped running and returned the following error message: Error: Command execution failed with exit code 125 Here are the steps we tried to fix the issue: We started by running podman info to get some extra details on what could be wrong: >podman info OS: windows/amd64 provider: wsl version: 5.3.1 Cannot connect to Podman. Please verify your connection to the Linux system using `podman system connection list`, or try `podman machine init` and `podman machine start` to manage a new Linux VM Error: unable to connect to Podman socket: failed to connect: dial tcp 127.0.0.1:2655: connectex: No connection could be made because the target machine actively refused it. That makes sense as the podman VM was not running. Let’s check the VM: >podman machine list NAME         ...
Read more

Cache stampede: when our cache turned against us

While investigating some performance issues, we ran into an ASP.NET Core API that cached a fairly expensive aggregation query for 60 seconds. Under normal load, that was fine: one request rebuilds the cache, everyone else reads from it. Under peak load, dozens of requests would arrive in that same expiry window, all see a cache miss, and all fire the same expensive query in parallel. The database didn't like that. That was the moment when our caching layer stopped helping and started hurting. A burst of requests comes in at the same time, all miss the cache, and all go hammer the database or the downstream API at once. That's a cache stampede . The cache was supposed to protect our backend, and for a few hundred milliseconds it did the opposite. Why this happens IMemoryCache.GetOrCreate (and its async sibling) looks like it protects you, but it doesn't add any locking on its own. Look at the naive version: public async Task<Report> GetReportAsync(string key) ...
Read more

The role of ActivitySource in OpenTelemetry for .NET

While doing some pair programming to integrate OpenTelemetry tracing to a .NET application, we had a discussion on how to use the ActivitySource . It looks simple. You new one up, give it a name, start an activity, done. The discussion started when we added a second ActivitySource with the exact same name in a different class. This made us wonder: "Are we duplicating traces now? Is this a memory leak? Do we need a singleton?" So we decided to dig deeper. This post is what we learned… What ActivitySource actually is ActivitySource is part of System.Diagnostics , not part of the OpenTelemetry NuGet packages. Microsoft built tracing primitives directly into the BCL, and OpenTelemetry's .NET SDK simply listens to them. This is why you can add distributed tracing to a library without taking a dependency on OpenTelemetry at all. An ActivitySource is a factory for Activity objects, and an Activity is .NET's name for what OpenTelemetry calls a span.(don’t ask m...
Read more