What commands are behind the Visual Studio Pack command? - visual-studio

Question

I'm trying to configure a GitHub workflow that builds my multi-target NuGet package (to be used with Xamarin.Forms) and pushes this package to GitHub and Nuget. I discussed the issue here, and it all seems to boil down to the following:
I cannot use dotnet pack in my workflow, it results in the following error:
C:\Users\user\.nuget\packages\msbuild.sdk.extras\2.1.2\Build\Workarounds.targets(27,5): error : If you are building projects that require targets from full MSBuild or MSBuildFrameworkToolsPath, you need to use desktop msbuild ('msbuild.exe') instead of 'dotnet build' or 'dotnet msbuild' [C:\path\to.csproj]
When I use MSBuild (either manually on my computer, or through the workflow), only the UWP declarations are available, and for all target platforms (Android, iOS, UWP).
When I right-click the class library project and click the Pack command, the resulting package works as expected. All platforms can call the platform-specific declarations.
Question:
Simple, what commands are behind the [Right-click csproj-file] → Pack? I want to try and run these commands manually to figure out what's going on...
Information:
msbuild version on my pc: 16.7.0.37604 (located at C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2019\Community\MSBuild\Current\Bin)
msbuild version on GitHub CI: 16.7.0+b89cb5fde
dotnet version on GitHub CI: 3.1.301

Answer 1

Apparently there is a bug in the MSBuild CLI.
When using the following command:
msbuild /t:Pack /p:Configuration=Debug Library/Company.Xamarin.Alert/Company.Xamarin.Alert.csproj
The produced nupkg can be installed in each project of a Xamarin.Forms application, and platform-specific code can be called.
However, when running the same command with the p:OutputPath parameter specified:
msbuild /t:Pack /p:Configuration=Debug /p:OutputPath=../.. Library/Company.Xamarin.Alert/Company.Xamarin.Alert.csproj
The resulting nupkg only contains the definitions for UWP.
I've filed a bug for this here.
My final workflow looks like this:
name: .NET Core
on:
push:
branches: [ master ]
pull_request:
branches: [ master ]
jobs:
build:
runs-on: windows-latest
steps:
- name: Checkout
uses: actions/checkout#v2
- name: Setup .NET Core
uses: actions/setup-dotnet#v1.5.0
with:
dotnet-version: 3.1.301
# Authenticates packages to push to GPR
source-url: https://nuget.pkg.github.com/${{ github.repository_owner }}/index.json
env:
NUGET_AUTH_TOKEN: '%NUGET_AUTH_TOKEN%'
- name: Setup MSBuild
uses: microsoft/setup-msbuild#v1.0.1
- name: Install dependencies
run: msbuild /t:Restore
env:
NUGET_AUTH_TOKEN: ${{ github.token }}
- name: Build
run: msbuild /t:Pack /p:Configuration=Debug Library/MintPlayer.MVVM/MintPlayer.MVVM.csproj
- name: PushNuget
run: dotnet nuget push "**/*.nupkg" --source https://api.nuget.org/v3/index.json --api-key ${{ secrets.PUBLISH_TO_NUGET_ORG }} --skip-duplicate
- name: PushGithub
run: nuget.exe push "**/*.nupkg" -NoSymbols -SkipDuplicate
env:
NUGET_AUTH_TOKEN: ${{ github.token }}