Attempt to fix publishing in VS

[jmezach]

Hopefully this will make sure that using the Publish option in Visual Studio will still publish the database as we did in previous versions of MSBuild.Sdk.SqlProj (prior to 4.0.0).

fixes #849
fixes #851

[ErikEJ]

@jmezach I tried this locally, publish does nothing - also maybe it should be "true" rather than "True" for consistency

[jmezach]

@ErikEJ I fixed the inconsistency, but I doubt that that is actually fixing something. Might need to get another binary log to figure that out though. But doing that from VS is a bit more involved, see https://github.com/dotnet/msbuild/blob/main/documentation/wiki/Providing-Binary-Logs.md#capturing-binary-logs-through-visual-studio.

[ErikEJ]

@jmezach Correct, the inconsistency fixed nothing, I will try to get a VS binary log

[jmezach]

@ErikEJ I made another change, can you gave that a shot? If that still doesn't work I might have to fire up a machine with Visual Studio installed :P

[ErikEJ]

Same issue:

Build started at 12:04...
1>------ Build started: Project: TestProject, Configuration: Release Any CPU ------
1>Using target framework net8.0 to run DacpacTool
1>TestProject -> C:\dev\GitHub\MsBuild.Sdk.SqlProj.Origin\test\TestProject\bin\Release\net8.0\TestProject.dacpac
2>------ Publish started: Project: TestProject, Configuration: Release Any CPU ------
2>Using target framework net8.0 to run DacpacTool
2>TestProject -> C:\dev\GitHub\MsBuild.Sdk.SqlProj.Origin\test\TestProject\bin\Release\net8.0\TestProject.dacpac
2>TestProject -> C:\dev\GitHub\MsBuild.Sdk.SqlProj.Origin\test\TestProject\bin\Release\net8.0\publish\
========== Build: 1 succeeded, 0 failed, 0 up-to-date, 0 skipped ==========
========== Build completed at 12:04 and took 02,843 seconds ==========
========== Publish: 1 succeeded, 0 failed, 0 skipped ==========
========== Publish completed at 12:04 and took 02,845 seconds ==========

[ErikEJ]

@jmezach I have sent a Windows binary log

[jmezach]

@ErikEJ I've got a fix now that works with VS. Only thing I'm a bit on the fence about now is whether we should have dotnet publish (note: without explicitly saying /t:PublishContainer) default to doing nothing or actually publish a container. We can have it either way, just wondering what the most natural way of working would be.

[ErikEJ]

@jmezach Publish normally means prepare the deployment - "Publishes the application and its dependencies to a folder for deployment to a hosting system."

In our case, it is basically the same as build as far as I can tell. So probably do nothing ?

[ErikEJ]

@jmezach I will do some smoke testing again this evening

[ErikEJ]

@jmezach Confirmed that this works! 🥂

[ErikEJ]

LGTM

[Copilot]

Pull request overview

This PR restores Visual Studio publish functionality for database projects by introducing a custom Publish target that conditionally includes the PublishDatabase target when building inside Visual Studio. Additionally, the solution file format is migrated from the classic .sln format to the newer .slnx XML format.

Changes:

• Added a Publish target with configurable dependencies that includes PublishDatabase when executed from Visual Studio
• Replaced the traditional .sln file with a new .slnx XML-based solution file
• Modified PublishDependsOn property to control publish behavior in different contexts

Reviewed changes

Copilot reviewed 3 out of 3 changed files in this pull request and generated 2 comments.

File	Description
src/MSBuild.Sdk.SqlProj/Sdk/Sdk.targets	Added Publish target and configured PublishDependsOn to restore database publishing in Visual Studio
MSBuild.Sdk.SqlProj.slnx	New XML-based solution file with project and folder structure
MSBuild.Sdk.SqlProj.sln	Removed classic solution file in favor of .slnx format

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[jmezach]

@jeffrosenberg Can you have a look at this as well?

[jmezach]

@ErikEJ @jeffrosenberg Maybe we should just merge this?

[ErikEJ]

@jmezach agree