ASP.NET v5 on a Build Server

Question

I'm trying to build a VS2015 ASP.NET v5 web app on our build server (basically, outside of Visual Studio). Our existing scripts simply invoke msbuild with the csproj file, but with this project I get:

Project File is empty

What is the "story" for "building" these new webapps outside Visual Studio? I believe they can still target .NET 4.5 (I hope so, as we're not upgrading web servers any time soon) so assumed it were possible.

Answer 1

Well there is no .csproj in a dnx project everything that is needed for dnu to build a project is contained in the project.json. There is a xproj file but you can ignore that. Microsoft has finally decided to see the light and uses xproj just for VS specific "stuff" and IDE agnostic project details are put in the project.json.

So to build a dnx project all you need is the right version of dnx and the project source code. Now AFAIK there are no out of the box solutions but everything is done with command line commands so script something up should be easy. It all depends on how robust of a solution you want to build.

To build a dnx project from the command line (assuming you have the proper dnx installed and set to active) it is just two commands. dnu restore runs a dependency check and dnu (a part of dnx) has a built in nuget client so it will reach out and grab dependencies if needed. dnu build runs that actual compilation.

So cd to the project root (which contains project.json) and run dnu restore then dnu build.

It gets more complex if you need to dynamically support different dnx versions. Keep in mind dnx versions are identified by runtime (coreclr or clr), architecture (x86, x64, etc), and a version number. So if you are only targetting say x64 builds on clr (full .net runtime) that eliminates two variables but what happens if a project requires a newer version of the runtime than what is installed on the build server? As an example say you installed (manually using dnvm) dnx-clr-win-x64.1.0.0-beta4 on the build server but at some point in the future a developer requires dnx-clr-win-x64.1.0.0-beta6-1200 to resolve a bug.

The simplistic solution would be just to install new runtime versions as needed and build all projects against the newest one needed. This isn't as bad as it might first sound. Once dnx gets out of beta changes to the runtime should be infrequent. Remember the runtime is the very low level code and unmanaged dlls. It is the bootstrapping stub that the BCL sits on top of. Hopefully there should not be that many changes to the dnx for a given OS, architecture and runtime.

For a more robust solution you could use scripting to find the runtime version required for a project. It is found in a solution level global.json. The script could then use dnvm list to determine if it has that runtime installed. If it doesn't then use dnvm install or dnvm upgrade to install the required version. Before starting the build it would use the command dnvm use to make the correct runtime active and then proceed with dnu restore and dnu build.

Honestly I expect some pretty robust solutions to come along. Task runners (gulp, grunt, etc) are first class citizens in .NET 5. Most likely your workflow will involve bower for client side dependency resolution, npm, grunt/gulp and some task packages for things like minifying js files. The build server is going to need all that as well so having a build task as a grunt or gulp package seems a pretty good fit.