I've requested to my Team Lead that we start integrating a CI/CD pipeline into most, if not all, of our projects. Our newest project relies heavily on our own, external class library that is referenced in the solution ; it is under "Dependencies" as a project reference.
The project runs fine when I build it in my machine using Visual Studio 2019, and before we needed to integrate an external library, it would build and release fine using our Azure DevOps pipelines.
However, with the addition of an external class library, when I try to run a build through Azure DevOps, I get the following error:
The project file ....csproj was not found.
I fully understand why it can't find it - because I need to pull in the external class library and build that first! There doesn't seem to be a lot of online material (not that I could find anyway!) that describes solutions to this other than "use nuget" ; unfortunately, it is a requirement from my Team Lead that this is not a route we go down - which has lead to a long couple of days!
With this in mind, I can't find another way to do this in Azure DevOps. I have looked into some sort of PowerShell command but to no avail thus far.
Has anyone run into this issue before with external class libraries in DevOps and can give me advice on the best way to approach it?
Generally speaking in 99,99% cases keeping a direct reference to the project is not a good idea. You can end up with really unmaintainable CI/CD logic and/or with dll versions mismatches during deployments. Actually I am an Architect in the project where I tried to fix that issue by migrating all dependencies to the NuGet server.
You mentioned, that you are using Azure DevOps as main CI/CD tool, so this is a great opportunity to introduce Azure Artifacts as internal nuget server which is a part of Azure DevOps. For the first 2 GB it is free, here you have pricing details.
If for some reason you cant use Azure Artifacts, I recommend some alernatives:
More information about alternatives you can find in this article.