Is building a specific project in a solution supposed to work?

[eriknilsontenstar]

When I run msbuild.exe /t:AProjectInThatSolution /graph /reportfileaccesses the output looks like

1. Starts up and runs the plugin like usual
2. Build succeeds, 0 cache hits, 0 cache misses, NaN cache hit ratio

Is this the intended behaviour?

MSBuild page describing how to build a specific project in a solution https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/msbuild/how-to-build-specific-targets-in-solutions-by-using-msbuild-exe?view=visualstudio

[dfederm]

That should work. I suspect that something is wrong with the MSBuild graph build (which I also heavily contribute to), not necessarily the cache plugin.

Are you able to provide a simple repo for the issue?

[eriknilsontenstar]

Hi dfederm, you are indeed correct that it does work! Until it doesn't... I don't understand these results:

• In a minimal solution with 3 projects, building each project by itself works
• In a "real" solution with 11 projects , building one of the library projects works This library project doesn't depend on any of the other projects.
• In that same "real" solution, building the executable project does not work - gives Cache Hit Ratio NaN

So, somewhere between the common library project and the executable it fails... Building the whole solution works as expected.

Is there a way of debugging the graph or something to understand where it might be breaking?

I'll build each of the 11 projects to see if there is a pattern to which break and which don't.

[eriknilsontenstar]

Ah, actually scratch that, building any single project in the "real" solution results in either:

• a cache miss because of "Ignoring successful build for node COMPANYPROJECT_COMPANY.PROJECT.VCXPROJ_B.BIRF3RA1HPUD8CRMPNBA with non-successful dependency: COMPANYOTHERPROJECT_COMPANYOTHERPROJECT.VCXPROJ_B.BIRF3RA1HPUD8CRMPNBA
• Cache Hit Ratio: NaN

But building the whole solution does work, we've been running it in our CI now for a while and its made the job way shorter.