We build mobile apps using Xamarin Forms, with macOS building the iOS apps. We ran into an issue today that has left me scratching my head.
A normal build with embedded resource files looks like this:
CoreResGen:
/Library/Frameworks/Mono.framework/Versions/5.16.0/lib/mono/4.5/resgen.exe /useSourcePath
[....all of our references....]
/compile
Resources/HtmlStyleRes.resx,obj/BuildAgentRelease_iOS/ForumApp.Common.Resources.HtmlStyleRes.resources
Resources/TextRes.resx,obj/BuildAgentRelease_iOS/ForumApp.Common.Resources.TextRes.resources
Resources/TextRes.nb.resx,obj/BuildAgentRelease_iOS/ForumApp.Common.Resources.TextRes.nb.resources
So no surprises there; the .resx files are compiled into binary .resources files with the assembly namespace + folder name + resx filename.
However, we made a change to our directory structure on the build server, and this changed the output from CoreResGen:
CoreResGen:
/Library/Frameworks/Mono.framework/Versions/5.16.0/lib/mono/4.5/resgen.exe /useSourcePath
[....all of our references....]
/compile
Resources/HtmlStyleRes.resx,obj/BuildAgentRelease_iOS/ForumApp.Common.HtmlStyleRes.resources
Resources/TextRes.resx,obj/BuildAgentRelease_iOS/ForumApp.Common.TextRes.resources
Resources/TextRes.nb.resx,obj/BuildAgentRelease_iOS/ForumApp.Common.TextRes.nb.resources
Notice how the "Resources" folder was dropped from the .resources filename. When compiled into an app, this causes our app to crash at runtime, since the resource file namespace is now different.
We build our apps using self-hosted Azure agents. All apps are built from the same repository, and as part of an effort to streamline the build servers, we implemented a pipeline task to utilize a common repository folder for all builds. The Azure agent would normally build out of _work/build-id/s, and our pipeline task will symlink this directory to _work/g/repo-id so that multiple builds can share the same repository.
When we build with the repo in _work/build-id/s, everything is fine. When we build with the symlinked repo, the file namespace error occurs.
As far as we can tell, this happens on macOS, but not on Windows.
We have a possibly related issue that happens on macOS, but not on Windows. The following outputs are from macOS using mono:
Path.GetDirectoryName(@"Resources\TextRes.resx") => ""
Path.GetDirectoryName(@"Resources/TextRes.resx") => "Resources"
Path.GetDirectoryName is used in CreateCSharpManifestResourceName to create the output file name from Resources\TextRes.resx, but there appear to be guards replacing \ with / and I can't see why symlinking the source folder would trigger it.
Has anyone experienced this? Am I missing something obvious?
