Why doesn't msbuild publish work the same as Publish from Visual Studio?

[rainersigwald]

Discussed in dotnet/msbuild#7138

^{Originally posted by hallambaker December 8, 2021}
I have a large project that supports ten separate platforms with customized builds for each. So I want to be able to script this.

When I publish from within VS, it uses the parameters specified in the .pubxml file.

<Project ToolsVersion="4.0" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/developer/msbuild/2003">
  <PropertyGroup>
    <Configuration>Release</Configuration>
    <Platform>x64</Platform>
    <PublishDir>..\..\Outputs\win-x64</PublishDir>
    <PublishProtocol>FileSystem</PublishProtocol>
    <TargetFramework>net6.0-windows</TargetFramework>
    <RuntimeIdentifier>win-x64</RuntimeIdentifier>
    <SelfContained>true</SelfContained>
    <PublishSingleFile>True</PublishSingleFile>
    <PublishReadyToRun>True</PublishReadyToRun>
    <PublishTrimmed>True</PublishTrimmed>
  </PropertyGroup>
</Project>

When I try to do the same thing from msbuild, it ignores the settings in the .pubxml which is really weird because that is the file I specified on the command line.

msbuild mmm.sln /p:PublishProfile=publish-win-x64 -verbosity:quiet
Microsoft (R) Build Engine version 17.0.0+c9eb9dd64 for .NET Framework
Copyright (C) Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.
...

Instead of building the Release configuration specified in the .pubxml, it builds the Debug, it doesn't publish a single file and it doesn't put it where I specified.

How can I get Msbuild to publish using the settings from the pubxml?

Why is this not considered a bug?

I did have some conversations with a team member who advised me to basically respecify everything on the command line. But the documentation is non existent, incomplete and conflicting.

All my code is in.

https://github.com/hallambaker/Mathematical-Mesh

Am I somehow getting an obsolete version of Msbuild? I don't think so:

C:\Users\hallam> where msbuild
C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio\2022\Community\Msbuild\Current\Bin\MSBuild.exe

[baronfel]

Hello! This is a super interesting investigation. I cloned your project and gathered some binlogs using the -bl switch, and I discovered the following log messages when building at the solution level with a publish profile specified:

The "Configuration" property is a global property, and cannot be modified.

This is because when building a solution, the solution file specifies Configuration/Platform/etc before building each of the projects in the solution. These are set as global properties, top-level of the build, and are immutable.

I can only imagine that inside VS when you publish, the publish is occurring at the project level, invoked for each project. I suspect that if you do the same, you'll start to work.