The compiler is smart enough to detect if a referenced assembly is used or not. So if in your root project, you add a Project Reference to other project and in that other project you have a NuGet package that is not used in the code, the compiler will not copy it to the output of the root project.

Usually it is a good thing, however, when developing a Sitecore website using Helix principles, it can be problematic. For example, you have Foundation.Serialization project with Unicorn package and you added it as a project reference in your WebRoot project. If you do a publish of WebRoot, the Unicorn.dll will not be published, because it’s not used anywhere in the code. It’s only mentioned in the config patch, but the compiler does not understand that.

This only happens with packages.config. If you use PackagesReferences it works fine without any fix. Fortunately, the fix is quite easy to implement and here is the code that we can add to the Helix.targets to fix it:

<PropertyGroup>
  <ResolveAssemblyReferencesDependsOn>
    $(ResolveAssemblyReferencesDependsOn);
    CollectReferencesFromHelixModules;
  </ResolveAssemblyReferencesDependsOn>
</PropertyGroup>

<Target Name="CollectReferencesFromHelixModules">
  <MSBuild Projects="@(ProjectReference)" Targets="ResolveAssemblyReferences" BuildInParallel="$(BuildInParallel)">
    <Output TaskParameter="TargetOutputs" ItemName="ReferencesFromHelixModules" />
  </MSBuild>
  <ItemGroup>
    <Reference Include="%(ReferencesFromHelixModules.FusionName)" Condition="'%(ReferencesFromHelixModules.CopyLocal)'=='true'">
      <ResolvedFrom>%(ReferencesFromHelixModules.ResolvedFrom)%(ReferencesFromHelixModules.FullPath)</HintPath>
      <Redist>%(ReferencesFromHelixModules.Redist)</Redist>
      <CopyLocal>true</CopyLocal>
    </Reference>
  </ItemGroup>
</Target>

What next?

In my next article in the MSBuild series I demonstrated how to build mvc views incrementally.