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How To Use Project Configuration To Select NuGet Packages
And how to make the TFS build pipeline like it.
My current client project is to build a service to help them purge old data from a legacy system as they upgrade to newer servers, software and environments. The application to purge old data needs to begin deleting data as quickly as possible despite not having finished migrating to the newest version of the customer’s ERP software. They have millions and millions of rows of stale transaction data that must be safely purged without affecting any non-transactional data along the way. This requires a tool that knows the rules of what to delete, what not to delete, and how to appropriately log the purge activity.
Since the purge tool is tightly coupled to the customer’s ERP software and their own processes, it is wise to reuse the APIs and ORM provided by the ERP software to do the work. However, in August the customer will cutover to a much newer version with different dependencies and configuration to drive the ORM. Fortunately the APIs are the same for what I’m using, so I don’t need to change any code.
One thing I hate doing is duplicating work unnecessarily. I have one Visual Studio 2019 project that builds the purge tool which targets .net Framework 4.6.2 due to the old version of the ERP. The customer has built NuGet packages for the core files needed to utilize the ERP outside the hosting webserver. The customer has built packages for the old and new versions, differentiated only by the release year of the ERP software in the package names.
I configured the VS Solution with two Configurations, one for each year, 2015 and 2017. The CPU options were whittled down to x64 since the tool is an exe and performance is critical. When the developer selects a configuration, the C# project file changes the referenced NuGet package by placing the $(Configuration) variable in the filename of the NuGet package’s PackageReference.
There is also a second project in the solution that is a WPF frontend for managing the purge application. It shares its app.config file with the main project via linking in VS. There are App.2015.config and App.2017.config files that are transformed via SlowCheetah.
