NetOfficeFw.Build on a clean project fails because it can't locate a .DLL from my project

[chadknudson]

I recently had to split my solution apart because our solution was exceeding the size for an Azure DevOps build pipeline. My COM AddIn for Word was moved to a new, smaller solution. When I tried to build that new solution, the NetOfficeFW.Build build task for Cleaning the COM AddIn from the registry was running and throwing an error that one of the other .DLLs from my project wasn't found. This error didn't happen before when this project was in my large solution, so I don't know quite what I did wrong when moving it to the smaller solution.

I resolved this by wrapping the NetOfficeFw.Build.targets import in a custom MSBuild property check that only includes the target if the expected DLL already exists. I did this by defining a custom condition based on file existence of the target COM AddIn DLL:

<PropertyGroup>
  <NetOfficeBuildEnabled Condition="Exists('bin\\$(Configuration)\\MyCOMAddIn.dll')">true</NetOfficeBuildEnabled>
</PropertyGroup>

I then wrap the Import of NetOfficeFw.Build.targets with that condition:

<Import Project="..\..\..\packages\NetOfficeFw.Build.2.1.0\build\NetOfficeFw.Build.targets"
        Condition="Exists('..\..\..\packages\NetOfficeFw.Build.2.1.0\build\NetOfficeFw.Build.targets') and '$(NetOfficeBuildEnabled)' == 'true'" />

I didn't need to do this in my old solution. I'm not sure where I messed things up.

[jozefizso]

Hi Chad, thanks for reporting this. Yes, this looks like a bug in the build script.