Add reference to ProduceReferenceAssembly

[redwyre]

[Enter feedback here]
reference ProduceReferenceAssembly to make this discoverable from search

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Document Details

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• ID: d5ca424e-247c-138d-1c41-9c2b116862df
• Version Independent ID: adc585dd-e215-4c70-f9a6-38a0e91e46da
• Content: Breaking change: Write reference assemblies to IntermediateOutputPath - .NET
• Content Source: docs/core/compatibility/sdk/6.0/write-reference-assemblies-to-obj.md
• Product: dotnet-fundamentals
• GitHub Login: @gewarren
• Microsoft Alias: gewarren

[gewarren]

@redwyre It looks like ProduceReferenceAssembly defaults to true for projects that target .NET 5 and later, so most people wouldn't be setting it explicitly. But I'm interested in why you think people would be searching on it.

[gewarren]

@baronfel Do you think a reference to ProduceReferenceAssembly should be added, and if so, in what context?

[baronfel]

The option is already quite well documented in the c# compiler options so I'm inclined to say we shouldn't need to add anymore. I'm definitely amenable to changing that feeling based on @redwyre's context, though. The wording of this page might be changed to suggest that reference assemblies aren't required to be generated from a given build? They're a performance optimization, after all.

[redwyre]

I enable ProduceReferenceAssembly because we ship them, and the new change broke the build, but ProduceReferenceAssembly is all I was setting in my csproj so there's nothing to link that you now need ProduceReferenceAssemblyInOutDir to get the same behaviour when you were relying on it. So just adding that to the page would make it discoverable for people like me that were wondering "why isn't ProduceReferenceAssembly working any more?"

[baronfel]

Proposed new verbiage for the Old behavior section:

Old behavior

Since reference assemblies were added, the .NET SDK has written reference assemblies to the ref directory in the OutDir directory of the compilation. In .NET 5, the ProduceReferenceAssembly property was introduced and defaulted to true for .net5.0 and higher applications, so many applications began generating reference assemblies to this directory implicitly.

@redwyre you set this property to true explicitly, so I'm gathering that you're not targeting net5.0+ for these projects?

[redwyre]

The projects have been updated from .net core -> net5 -> net6, but I set it to true originally because I explicitly use the reference dlls as build outputs (which is why it's a breaking change).