Recursively include Nuget DLLs via Gitignore - asp.net-mvc

I am using GIT with a new ASP.NET MVC project. I have a line in my gitignore file to ignore dlls
*.dll
I would like to add something along the lines of the following to include (i.e. do not ignore) DLLs in my NUGET packages folder
!/packages/*.dll
The problem I'm encountering is that not all nuget packages are created equally and, depending on the package in question, DLLs may be nested an arbitrary number of levels in the path hierarchy. It seems that I simply need a recursive solution along the lines of:
!/packages/**/*.dll
!/packages/**/*
I have not yet found a solution that will work via mysysgit (or any windows distribution of git).
Does anyone know of a way to make this work???

Leave your top level gitignore alone by keeping *.dll in it.
Create another .gitignore file in the packages directory and put !*.dll in it.

Another option to consider is NOT including your NuGet dlls in your repository and instead only download them the first time you build your project. This is what we do with all of our NuGet dependencies.
UPDATE
Nuget handles this now without having to manually create your own build events. See the details on this page: http://docs.nuget.org/docs/workflows/using-nuget-without-committing-packages
Original Answer:
We put the NuGet.exe application in a tools folder under our solution, and then add the following to our project pre-build event.
"$(SolutionDir)Tools\NuGet.exe" install "$(ProjectDir)packages.config" -o "$(SolutionDir)Packages"
The first time we build the app it will download all of the dependencies, but with subsequent builds, NuGet is smart enough to see that they already exist at the correct version and skips them.

Related

TFS Agent Build Reference errors

I am attempting to create my first ever agent build using on my my asp.net mvc projects. The agent is on my own computer. Everything appears to work fine up until after the nuget restore.
Picture:
It is telling me that my System.Web.MVC assembly could not be located. Since this is of course my first build I am unsure of what to do or what could cause this issue especially since it builds fine locally in VS.
Any help would be greatly appreciated:
TFS Version: 16.122.27102.1
You can follow steps below to locate the cause of the issue and resolve it:
1.The Nuget 4.3.0 you're using is too old. Instead you should use recommended 5.7.0. (Modify your Use Nuget Task)
2.Check log of your restore step.
The missing System.Web.MVC comes from Microsoft.AspNet.Mvc nuget package, so you should make sure this package is actually downloaded/installed. And make sure the hintPath in your csproj is correct compared to the installation path of the nuget package.
Also make sure you're restoring for whole solution instead of one specific project.
Check whether you added packages folder into source control. The packages folder in SolutionDir should not be added into source control! It will affect the restore stop.
3.Check MSBuild arguments of Build task, you can share the arguments and build logs here if convenient.

Automated Nuspec Package Creation

Problem
So I am working on a feature to allow my team the ability to create NuGet Packages of specific projects automatically upon the project building successfully in Jenkins. I have spent the last 3 days researching how to contruct/create/build nuspec packages and NuGet packages... but nothing seems to point me in quite the same direction I am trying to take this in.
So far, from what I have learned and understood about creating NuGet packages, the primary way to do this is the following steps:
Download nuget.exe and place a copy of it in the target project's root folder.
Open the cmdprompt and navigate to the target project's root folder
Run the following command nuget spec
Open the newly created nuspect file and update all default values to the appropriate values for the target project
Save the changes, then run the following command in the cmdprompt nuget pack packagename.nuspec
Although the above works as expect, it isn't really very automated.
I have taken an approach in which I created a script that has a nuspec template and populates fields, but I still require a lot of input from the user to make this happen.
Question
Is there any way to automatically generate a properly populated nuspec package for a target project that requires minimal input from a user?
There is a package on NuGet that
Works well in a continuous integration environment with a build server; and
Creates a nuspec file for your project.
Source code with a larger readme is on Github

using tfs build pull a prebuilt common components into another build

I'm looking for advice on how to have team build 2013 use a pre-compiled common that is not checked in or part of the workspace.
Everything we build is QNX based and we are refactoring out a common set of components to be shared across all projects. I've looked at Go and NuGet but that seems like a lot effort for something like this.
What is the best way to pull a prebuilt common into a TFS Team Build?
So you would nuget "publish" a package.
https://docs.nuget.org/create/creating-and-publishing-a-package
then your build would nuget restore using a packages.config file (aka, NOT a .sln file)
nuget restore [<solution>|<packages.config file>]
https://docs.nuget.org/consume/command-line-reference
What VS (in a .sln file) is auto-voodooing some of this for you.
But using command line nuget (especially for the restore)....is a way to get a package out of nuget if you're build isn't based on .sln file.
Another way to think about it is...when you run "nuget install" or "nuget update", VS is auto-voodooing you a packages.config file. While you might look at the file and find it interesting, you're not consumed on how it works in the background of VS. But if you want to manually pull nuget packages....you will be very interested in how it is created.
What I would do as a test would be:
Create a dummy .sln,csproj file.
Nuget add a few random packages (using "Manage Nuget Packages for this solution).
Take that packages.config that was auto-voodoo created for you.... and move it to a clean directory.
See if you can run nuget.exe restore on it, and get/pull the packages (aka, you're testing that you can do a pull... without a .sln file being involved).
If that works...than it becomes of matter of creating your own nuget repository..creating your own published-package...and repeating #4 above to get that package out.
Make sense?
So I have these files in a clean directory:
.\packages.config
.\.nuget\NuGet.Config
.\.nuget\NuGet.exe
.\.nuget\NuGet.targets
Then I run in the comamand-window:
.\.nuget\nuget.exe restore .\packages.config -PackagesDirectory .\MyPackages
And all the packages listed in "packages.config" will download to : .\MyPackages
Note, if you have a custom nuget repository, that will need to be configured...but cross that bridge when you get there.

Choose what goes to drop folder of TFS build

I have a drop folder created by TFS build which contains all the produced artifacts:
.dll \ .config \ .pdb files from all projects
_PublishedWebsites folder
*.msi files produces by Wix projects
All I really care about is *.msi files as everything I deploy is in them.
How can I specify for the TFS build not to bother with all the other files in the Drop folder?
I know I can customize the build to delete files after the solution build, but maybe there is a clever way of disabling them at all?
Personally I use named platforms such as Application and Setup in my SLNs so that when TFS archives the drop folder one class of files goes into one directory structure and another class of files goes into another. This way it's easy to find the MSI and it's also easy to see what the application code looked like before then. (Perhaps the contents of a web.config or an HTML that was added to the application sln but not the installer sln.
IF you want to suppress the application sln from archiving you have to look at that. It's not an MSI / WiX thing.
If you are using TFS 2013 (or VSO) you can easily have a PowerShell executed post build to do whatever clean up and rearranging you need.
Note: The build used the files in the root to do testing, code analysis, test impact analysis, and other automatic actions. Make sure that you only remove files after all of the checks. A better idea is to leave the files be and just push theb*.msi files to a "/_PublishedApplications/* folder.
There is a PublishedApplication Nuget package that can make this easyer. Take a look...
If you are using TFS 2010/2012 you can use the "TFS Community Build Tools" to call PowerShell and do other things.

TFS, NuGet, Package Restore Finding projects that needs to be updated?

So the past few days i've been setting up NuGet, making packages of our internal libraries, updating our projects, getting our TFS Build server to Build. all of this is awesome! Now I have a problem though, before NuGet and package restore I could search TFS for the .dll files, as an example I could search for Company.Common.dll in TFS and find all projects that utilized this dll with the following command:
tf dir "$/*Company.common.dll" /recursive
/server:http://tfs-server:8080
Now after we have started using NuGet and using package restore the dll file Company.Common.dll will not be present in TFS in the projects that uses it. that means I can't use the above search command to find the .dll file I want to update
I was contemplating writing a powershell script that would find all packages.config files in TFS and download them to a folder structure indicating where in TFS the different projects are located. Then I would traverse the packages.config file to figure out what projects used the specific NuGet package I wanted to update.
The reason for this is ofcourse that all our projects should have the Common.dll updated when there is an update too it.
What I would like to know is if anyone has already solved this "problem", so I don't have to invent the wheel again, or perhaps have some perspective or constructive comments on this. I guess the core question is this:
How do you handle updating a package across ALL projects, when there are multiple teams that create / update projects in TFS?
One solution would be to use the "repositoryPath" NuGet config settings and make it point to a central UNC share. More details here # http://docs.nuget.org/docs/release-notes/nuget-2.1.
You can use NuGet.exe Update packageName -RepositoryPath xxx -Source xxx command to update the specific package if needed.

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