Marking project references as PrivateAssets="compile" doesn't work as expected

[davidfowl]

Trying to answer this question dotnet/standard#755 I wrote a sample app that has a console app and 2 class libraries:

App -> Lib1 -> Lib2

I then tried to mark the project reference between Lib1 and Lib2 as PrivateAssets="Compile" to see if it would work and it turns out the IDE works like a charm, but building the App fails like this:

Cannot find project info for 'C:\Users\dfowler\source\repos\ConsoleApp6\ClassLibrary2\ClassLibrary2.csproj'. This can indicate a missing project reference. | ConsoleApp6 | C:\Program Files\dotnet\sdk\2.1.300\Sdks\Microsoft.NET.Sdk\targets\Microsoft.NET.Sdk.targets | 128 |  

Is this supposed to work?

[davidfowl]

/cc @nguerrera @dsplaisted

[nguerrera]

I think it could work since the transitive P2P refs are determined by restore. I suspect that we've got a broken assumption in GenerateDependencyFile. See also #2232.

A possible workaround would be to set <GenerateDependencyFile>false</GenerateDependencyFile> on the class library project, assuming that you don;t actually need .deps.json for those. Generally, you don't for libs (exceptions are unit tests, preserve compilation context).

[jp2masa]

I have a similar issue, but with ExcludeAssets="Compile", is it supposed to work too?

[dsplaisted]

@jp2masa I believe ExcludeAssets isn't currently supported at all on ProjectReference items. However, ReferenceOutputAssembly="false" should do what you want. More info here: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/kirillosenkov/2015/04/04/how-to-have-a-project-reference-without-referencing-the-actual-binary/