Conditional AssemblyName causes C# project to always rebuild when using names other than "Debug"/"Release"

So I'm adding a "d" extension to my assembly name when building in debug mode. As far as I can tell the standard way to do this in C# is to edit the .csproj file and put in the following:

<PropertyGroup>
  <AssemblyName Condition="'$(Configuration)' == 'V90 Debug'">$(AssemblyName)d</AssemblyName>
</PropertyGroup>

That has the desired effect, but now the darn project always rebuilds the output .dll, causing other projects that depend on it to relink, etc.. Without this change, I don't have any such problem.

So far increasing the verbosity of the project output hasn't helped.

Edit: An additional, important detail is tha开发者_运维问答t we're using names like "V90 Release", "V90 Debug", "V100 Release" etc.. for our configurations, so that we can target different versions of the Visual Studio runtime. I wrote a test app with the standard configuration names and found my problem doesn't happen in that case.

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You are using an old standard in C/C++ development. The Big Difference with managed code is the absence of a linker. You used to configure the linker to use the "d" version of the library in the Debug build, the non-d version of the library in the Release build. That mechanism is completely absent in .NET, code in libraries are dynamically linked at runtime. Making the practically of having different names for different builds dramatically less.

One of the problems you'll encounter if you pursue this old strategy is that you'll have additional problems with the reference assemblies of a project. There is no decent way to use different names in different configurations. Dependent assemblies are listed in the Reference node of the project, this is a property of a project that is not configuration dependent. It is not impossible, you'll need a lot more Condition hacks to rename the reference assemblies. Build dependency checking is likely to be affected by this as well.

This is not actually necessary, the debug and release build of the assemblies will have the same metadata. But if you skip that, you'll now have a problem at runtime. The CLR will be told to use the wrong assembly name. Hacking around that is technically possible by hiding the assemblies in a sub-directory and using the AppDomain.AssemblyResolve event to load the correct one. You'll need a post-build event to rename and copy the assembly into this directory. This all gets ugly in a hurry when those assemblies have dependencies on other assemblies.

Long story short, your previous standard just isn't a good one for managed code.