Make it easier to express dependencies among projects without referencing output assembly

[tmat]

It is sometimes necessary to build project A before project B without project B referencing the assembly that A generates. In such cases one can use ProjectReference with ReferenceOutputAssembly="false".

This however is not sufficient in all scenarios, especially when these projects target different, incompatible frameworks and/or multi-target.

Turns out 3 properties need to be set to make this work:

<ProjectReference Include="B.csproj" 
       ReferenceOutputAssembly="false"
       SkipGetTargetFrameworkProperties="true"
       GlobalPropertiesToRemove="TargetFramework" />

This is much more complex than it should be.

Proposal: introduce a new item that can be use to express that this project depends on building another project, but has no implication on references. Such item could be called e.g. ProjectBuildOrderDependency, DependsOnProject, etc.

<DependsOnProject Include="B.csproj" />

[nguerrera]

cc @rainersigwald

[rainersigwald]

Any change here would need to live on the MSBuild side of the fence, because you can have dependencies to SDK projects from non-SDK projects.

[rainersigwald]

This issue was moved to dotnet/msbuild#3843