Assemblies appear to be smaller when build with MSBuild than with Visual Studio

Question

Currently we are trying to set up a build server and make use of MSBuild to compile our *.sln file. MSBuild is also used to create a package for deployment.

At the moment all assemblies get compiled by MSBuild and the deployment package gets created too. But the most assemblies appear to be smaller in filesize than the assemblies created by Visual Studio 2013. When running the webapplication there is a MetadataException at System.Data.Entity.Core.Metadata.Edm.MetadataArtifactLoaderCompositeResource.LoadResources(...) It seems that MSBuild doesn't include these resources.

The project makes use of the Devart Entity Developer.

MSBuild gets invoked by:

• C:\Program Files (x86)\MSBuild\12.0\Bin\MSBuild.exe
• Parameters /p:Configuration=Release /p:Platform="Any CPU" /detailedsummary /verbosity:normal /p:DeployOnBuild=True /p:DeployTarget=Package /p:PackageLocation="${bamboo.build.working.directory}\Deployment\MSDeployPackage.zip"

In the *.cproj file I saw this, but I cant see any reference on this in the MSBuild console output.

<DevartEntityDeploy Include="Model\Model.edml">
   <Generator>DevartEfGenerator</Generator>
   <LastGenOutput>Model.info</LastGenOutput>
</DevartEntityDeploy>

Any suggestions on how to use MSBuild to get the correct output?

Cheers Philip

Answer 1

Seems the reason for this issue was the missing folder v12.0 and the file C:\Program Files (x86)\MSBuild\v12.0\Custom.After.Microsoft.Common.targets which contains the import of the Devart-Targets.

Now it works as expected!