Using a NuGet Package Created with CPack in Visual Studio

Question

I am creating a NuGet package of a C++ CMake project using CPack.

cmake -S . -B build
cmake --build build --config Release
cd build
cpack -G NuGet -C 'Release'

I have defined several cpack variables, e.g.:

CPACK_PACKAGE_NAME
CPACK_PACKAGE_VENDOR
CPACK_PACKAGE_DESCRIPTION

• The package is generated successfully. It contains an include and lib directory, just as the CMake's install() commands it to.
• I can add the NuGet package to my project in Visual Studio. The content gets installed.
• But the project doesn't find the headers and libs. I guess the meta data is missing in the package.

How do I add this info? Or am I missing something?

Answer 1

The meta info I was looking for can be found in a .targets file. See here for more info.

So I manually created such a file and added it with a cmake install() instruction, so cpack would include it in the NuGet package. Important: Visual Studio looks for it in a subdirectory called build, more specifically: <nuget root>/build/**/<nuget name>.targets. It looks something like this:

<Project>
  <ItemDefinitionGroup>
    <Link>
      <AdditionalDependencies>
        $(MSBuildThisFileDirectory)../lib/foo.lib;
  [...]
  <ItemDefinitionGroup>
    <ClCompile>
      <AdditionalIncludeDirectories>
        $(MSBuildThisFileDirectory)../include;
  [...]
  <ItemGroup>
    <None Include="$(MSBuildThisFileDirectory)../bin/foo.dll">
        <CopyToOutputDirectory>PreserveNewest</CopyToOutputDirectory>
  [...]

I mostly reverse engineered the syntax from random nuget packages. I'm not 100% happy with this solution. But it works.

Fee free to tell me more about it if you know anything :-)