Building NuGet packages from Visual Studio

Question

I'm trying to share an internal company assembly via NuGet packages and a private source. This assembly targets .NET Framework 4.6.1. I want these NuGet packages to pack automatically from Visual Studio during the release build. I see I can add <GeneratePackageOnBuild>true</GeneratePackageOnBuild> to .csproj. I'm not sure if this is a .NET Standard-specific property but it seems to partially work. However, when I build, I get

error MSB4044: The "GetPackOutputItemsTask" task was not given a value for the required parameter "PackageOutputPath".

I've been trying to learn how to pass this parameter from within Visual Studio but I don't see a lot of documentation on parameters except when calling it from the command line manually. Is there an easy way to do this from within Visual Studio? Am I going about this wrong?

Edit: This is using a .NET Framework class library. I can run the pack command from the command line giving it the required parameters with /p:PackageOutputPath="path\here". It seems this might have been designed for .NET Core and Standard projects and Visual Studio might not handle packing .NET Framework projects.

Answer 1

To enable on-build packing in a "non SDK" project, using old .NET framework (eg:. 4.5.1) and visual studio 2019 without using custom Target. you need to do the following step:

1. add a first PropertyGroup tag on the csproj
2. add minimal tags Authors and PackageOutputPath
3. check that the same PropertyGroup has GeneratePackageOnBuild

Now the variables will be passed to the internally triggered msbuild -t:Pack command.

Here an example of working configuration, please make sure this will be the first <PropertyGroup> of the .csproj:

  <PropertyGroup>
    <Title>packageid</Title>
    <Description>your description</Description>
    <Version>1.1.1</Version>
    <ReleaseNotes>New package system</ReleaseNotes>
    <Authors>authors</Authors>
    <Owners>owners</Owners>
    <Copyright>your copyrights</Copyright>
    <PackageOutputPath>bin\Package</PackageOutputPath>
    <GeneratePackageOnBuild>true</GeneratePackageOnBuild>
  </PropertyGroup>

If you are looking for the references, here:

• how to create a nuget package with msbuild
• all possible tags to set on the csproj on the first PropertyGroup

Answer 2

I have a unique situation of needing to Register for Com Interop for and older application but also needing to pack for use in other internal applications and development in our company. I actually got this to work for a .NET Framework project from Visual Studio. Manually adding GeneratePackageOnBuild did attempt to make a package for me in VS2017. I was also able to add other .NET Core project properties such as <Authors>,<Description>, etc. I haven't tried VS2019 yet so maybe that is more restricted but I hope not.

The issue is VS2017 doesn't feed the pack target the output parameter (in this type of project). So then I tried to call pack in the After Build events but that causes a recursive loop because packing also attempts to build (dotnet and nuget both seem to call the msbuild pack target which calls a build). I then found an option -p:NoBuild=true for msbuild that allows me to call the pack target without msbuild actually building the project. Therefore I added the following command to <PostBuildEvent> and it works.

"$(MSBuildBinPath)\msbuild" -t:Pack "$(ProjectPath)" -p:PackageOutputPath="$(SolutionDir)..\packages" -p:NoBuild=true

Edit: I eventually used the following in my csproj. Calling nuget directly worked better because I had a nuspec file that was not getting merged or fully used when calling MSBuild directly.

<Target Name="CustomPack" AfterTargets="Build" Condition="'$(Configuration)'=='Release'">
  <Message Text="Custom Pack command starts ..." Importance="high" />
  <Exec Command="&quot;nuget&quot; pack &quot;$(ProjectPath)&quot; -OutputDirectory &quot;$(ProjectDir)..\..\packages&quot; -Prop Configuration=Release" />
</Target>