Look at VS Text Templates, or we sometimes make use the C-preprocessor.
Bingo! I'm a big fan of T4 templates and have used them in anger in many projects ... but I didn't think of using them in this case. I just did a sanity check and it works. Thankfully someone published an example of how to get the active configuration value inside the tt file (in brief). <#@ template debug="false" hostspecific="true" language="C#" #> <#@ assembly name="System.Core" #> <#@ assembly name="EnvDTE" #> <#@ import namespace="System" #> <#@ import namespace="EnvDTE" #> <#@ output extension=".html" #> <# var serviceProvider = Host as IServiceProvider; var dte = serviceProvider.GetService(typeof(DTE)) as DTE; var configName = dte.Solution.SolutionBuild.ActiveConfiguration.Name; #> <html> ... (etc) With the config value I can now <# if #> control the contents of the html file. It looks a bit strange in the VS solution tree, but so what, it works. There is one quirk ... the T4 generator does not run automatically when the configuration changes or when you build or publish, so I must remember to Alt+B+4 as needed. Thanks, *Greg* P.S. If I see you at DDD I'll shout you a drink as thanks.
*From:* Greg Keogh via ozdotnet <ozdotnet@ozdotnet.com> *Sent:* Tuesday, December 5, 2023 11:59 AM *To:* ozDotNet <ozdotnet@ozdotnet.com> *Cc:* Greg Keogh <gfkeogh@gmail.com> *Subject:* Conditional builds of arbitrary files
Folks, the MSBuild process provides Condition= and #if to provide lots of control over which files and code fragments are compiled and published for a given Configuration.
My projects contain increasing numbers of non-cs files like html, css, js, txt, etc which often need conditional processing, especially the equivalent of a #if to select fragments of those sorts of files for different configurations. There's no way to select fragments of arbitrary files with a #if, so I've been wondering for years about the best way to simulate the feature.
I can't find any tools to do this, so I *think* that a custom MSBuild Task might be the way to go. The task could be given some parameters and it would edit the files and add and remove sections based upon the configuration before the build starts.
Does anyone think that's a good idea? Or maybe there's a better way.
Cheers,
*Greg Keogh*