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resolve-project-references

Guide for interpreting ResolveProjectReferences time in MSBuild performance summaries. Activate when ResolveProjectReferences appears as the most expensive target and developers are trying to optimize it directly. Explains that the reported time includes wait time for dependent project builds and is misleading. Guides users to focus on task self-time instead. Do not activate for general build performance -- use build-perf-diagnostics instead.

Published by dotnet ↗dotnet/skills

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Use resolve-project-references to analyze [diagnostic build log or binlog] where ResolveProjectReferences is the top target, explain the misleading wait time, and identify the dependent-build work to optimize instead.

Required inputs

[diagnostic build log or binlog]

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SKILL.md

name: resolve-project-referencesdescription: "Guide for interpreting ResolveProjectReferences time in MSBuild performance summaries. Activate when ResolveProjectReferences appears as the most expensive target and developers are trying to optimize it directly. Explains that the reported time includes wait time for dependent project builds and is misleading. Guides users to focus on task self-time instead. Do not activate for general build performance -- use build-perf-diagnostics instead."license: MIT

Misleading ResolveProjectReferences Time

Prevent misguided optimization of ResolveProjectReferences by explaining that its reported time is wall-clock wait time, not CPU work.

When to Use

ResolveProjectReferences appears as the most expensive target in the Target Performance Summary
A developer is trying to optimize ResolveProjectReferences directly
Build performance analysis shows a single target consuming 50-80% of total build time

When Not to Use

General build performance optimization (use build-perf-diagnostics instead)
The bottleneck is clearly a different target (e.g., Csc, ResolveAssemblyReference)
The user has not yet captured a binlog or performance summary

Inputs

Input	Required	Description
Build log or binlog	Yes	A diagnostic build log or binlog containing the Target Performance Summary

Workflow

Step 1: Confirm the misleading symptom

Verify that ResolveProjectReferences appears as the top target in the Target Performance Summary. This is the misleading metric.

Step 2: Explain why it is misleading

The reported time includes waiting for dependent projects to build while the MSBuild node is yielded (see dotnet/msbuild#3135). During this wait, the node may be doing useful work on other projects. The target itself does very little work.

Step 3: Redirect to task self-time

Use the Task Performance Summary to identify the real bottleneck.

Primary: binlog MCP (preferred)

Use the binlog MCP server expensive_tasks tool to get task self-time rankings directly from the binlog.

Fallback: text-log replay (when MCP is unavailable)

dotnet msbuild build.binlog -noconlog -fl "-flp:v=diag;logfile=full.log;performancesummary"
grep "Task Performance Summary" -A 50 full.log

Focus on self-time of actual tasks:

Csc: see build-perf-diagnostics skill (Section 2: Roslyn Analyzers)
ResolveAssemblyReference: see build-perf-diagnostics skill (Section 1: RAR)
Copy: see build-perf-diagnostics skill (Section 4: File I/O)
Serialization bottlenecks: see build-parallelism skill

Validation

Task Performance Summary was used instead of Target Performance Summary
ResolveProjectReferences was not set as the optimization target
A concrete task (e.g., Csc, Copy, ResolveAssemblyReference) was identified as the true bottleneck