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Because of ClickOnce, I need to change the assembly name of our WPF application for each environment/configuration used.

The configs are:

  • Debug
  • Testing
  • Release

So, to be able to publish the 3 environments to ClickOnce and to have all of them installed in one machine without one overriding the other, we need to have a different assembly name for the main project of our solution for all three environments. The assemblies would be named like this:

  • MyApp.Client.Debug
  • MyApp.Client.Testing
  • MyApp.Client

Thanks to this StackOverflow answer , I managed to do it, and it works great. The code for MyApp.Client.csproj is this:

 <PropertyGroup>
...
    <AssemblyName>MyApp.Client</AssemblyName>
...
</PropertyGroup>

<PropertyGroup Condition=" '$(Configuration)|$(Platform)' == 'Debug|AnyCPU' ">
    <AssemblyName>MyApp.Client.Debug</AssemblyName>
    ...
</PropertyGroup>

<PropertyGroup Condition=" '$(Configuration)|$(Platform)' == 'Testing|AnyCPU' ">
    <AssemblyName>MyApp.Client.Testing</AssemblyName>
    ...
</PropertyGroup>

I can publish it to my different environments and it goes well, and I can execute my application and work with it. But I can't debug it within Visual Studio, it seems that the IDE seeks "MyApp.Client" as the application entry point and throws something like this:

Visual Studio cannot start debugging because the debug target 'D:\Code\MySolution\MyApp\bin\Testing\MyApp.Client.exe' is missing. Please build the project and retry, or set the OutputPath and AssemblyName properties appropriately to point at the correct location for the target assembly.

Being on Testing, it should search for MyApp.Client.Testing.exe, but that doesn't happen. I have been googling for some time about this error, but I haven't been able to find a solution. All references that I find talk about changed OutputPath and things like that, but I think that's not the problem, since the OutputPath is OK, the problem is the executable name.

Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.

xecollons
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  • Did you try to specify the path to the executable under Project->Properties->Debug->Start Action->Start external program ? – mm8 Nov 08 '17 at 13:18
  • @xecollons, Any update for this issue? Have you resolved your issue? If not, Please let me know the latest information about this issue. – Leo Liu Nov 13 '17 at 02:23
  • @LeoLiu-MSFT Sorry for the late answer. At the end, I couldn't do anything, your response wasn't valid for what I wanted to achieve (it's not comfortable to be changing Assembly Names every time I change the environment). What I did was to define a parameter for the assembly name and pass it throug msbuild in our RC and Production compilations. Thanks anyway for the help. – xecollons Nov 27 '17 at 08:48

1 Answers1

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Debug not working in VS2017 when conditionally changing main assembly name

That is because Visual Studio calls the default property settings when you are in debug mode(Project->Properties->Application->Assembly name) instead of accessing the entire .csproj file to generate the corresponding .exe as in build and publish, and the modification in the .csproj file will not affect the default properties. For example, when you select the Configuration to Testing, the default property of Assembly name still MyApp.Client on the properties window:

enter image description here

To resolve this issue, you should manually change the default properties Assembly name, like MyApp.Client.Testing:

enter image description here

Leo Liu
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