Override One Property in a .targets file

Question

Hello,
I have a question about MSBuild (asked on
Stack Overflow) that seems to have stumped the community. I was wondering if someone here might be able to give some advice. Thank you!
The question is as follows:
Background: I have several solutions with roughly 300 C++ projects across them, most of them shared across solutions. We are using Visual Studio 2013 and have a build script that compiles
all of the projects in the correct order, ensuring dependencies are resolved ahead of time. Our development/engineering team builds all of the code through the build script and then attempts to test/debug using Visual Studio 2013.
Issue: The "build then debug" process results in Visual Studio telling us that the Projects are out of date. This stems from the ProjectEvaluationFingerprint property (in Line 39 Microsoft.CppBuild.targets)
including a $(SolutionDir) in
the output file. The recommended
fix from Microsoft suggests removing the $(SolutionDir) from
the file. As our developers tends to transition back and forth between projects, I do not want to manually change this .targets file on every developer's machine (and remember to change it back when they leave the project). I would like to override the property
in the .vcxproj by using a .targets file explicitly for this.
The property in Microsoft.CppBuild.targets looks like:
<!-- Global up-to-date check support -->
<PropertyGroup>
<ProjectEvaluationFingerprint>$(Configuration)|$(Platform)|$(SolutionDir)|$(ProjectEvaluationFingerprint)</ProjectEvaluationFingerprint>
</PropertyGroup>
Generally, I have been following
Microsoft's How to: Use the Same Target in Multiple Project Files. I have created a .targets file (test.targets) that contains the following code (note the TEST text was to test evaluation of the property in both the build script and building the project
in Visual Studio):
<Project ToolsVersion="12.0" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/developer/msbuild/2003">
<PropertyGroup>
<ProjectEvaluationFingerprint>$(Configuration)|$(Platform)|TEST|$(ProjectEvaluationFingerprint)</ProjectEvaluationFingerprint>
</PropertyGroup>
</Project>
I then import it using the following line in the .vcxproj
<Import Project="..\..\Config\VSPropertySheets\test.targets" />
The project.lastbuildstate file now reads:
#TargetFrameworkVersion=v4.0:PlatformToolSet=v120_xp:EnableManagedIncrementalBuild=false:VCToolArchitecture=Native32Bit
Debug|Win32|D:\views\devbranch\Products\SLN\|Debug|Win32|TEST|
It is appending the new ProjectEvaluationFingerprint to the existing one, so it is not
overriding (I can understand this to a degree, but I'm no MSBuild expert).
Question: How can I override this one property using a .targets file? Do I need to use a replaceregexp
task or do I have an easier option?

Answer 1

Hello K.Kennedy,
The replaceregexp task is not the MSBuild task, I'm afraid you cannot use it in your MSbuild project.
I know you may have use the solution listed on MSDN, but I'm not so sure of your steps, could you please make sure you've done everything mentioned on the following blog:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jomo_fisher/archive/2004/09/16/230631.aspx
Here the keypoint seems to be this "MSBuild chooses the last target seen", which may helpful on your issue.
Best regards,
Barry
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