Visual Studio dependencies

I figured I'd walk through the details on how to find out dependencies of a Visual Studio solution/project. (For those who haven't figured it out yet, this is a description how Dependency Visualizer does it)

1) For MSBuild compatible project types, it's dead simple, just use the following XPaths, where msbuild stands for the MSBuild schema: http://schemas.microsoft.com/developer/msbuild/2003

Assembly references: /msbuild:Project/msbuild:ItemGroup/msbuild:Reference/@Include

Project references: /msbuild:Project/msbuild:ItemGroup/msbuild:ProjectReference/msbuild:Project/text() returns a relative path to the project file.

2) There are project types that aren't MSBuild compatible (most notably C++ ones), and due to popular demand, I had to add support for these also to Dependency Visualizer.

Assembly references are simple: /VisualStudioProject/References/AssemblyReference/@AssemblyName

Project references: Here is where it starts getting nasty..

/VisualStudioProject/References/ProjectReference/@ReferencedProjectIdentifier gives... you guessed it, a GUID identifying the referenced project. This means we have to parse the freeish text format of the solution file, to find out what project hides behind the GUID. But it gets uglier still, turns out that there's actually dependencies and dependencies. If you go to "Project Dependencies..." window (in VC++) and check a project, then you end up with a reference that's only existing in the solution file like so:

  Project("{8BC9CEB8-8B4A-11D0-8D11-00A0C91BC942}") = "ProjectName",
  "ProjectName\ProjectName.vcproj", "{769945FD-50DC-49E4-B93E-54250D7BF541}"
    ProjectSection(ProjectDependencies) = postProject
      {A4583937-88F4-4C1D-B5A9-E711C3951E3A} = {A4583937-88F4-4C1D-B5A9-E711C3951E3A}
    EndProjectSection
  EndProject

Where the GUID:s fit together like so: the first one is the type, the one on the second row is the project identifier, the thwo on the fourth row is the identifier of the referenced project.

Technorati : Dependency Visualizer, MSBuild, Visual Studio