Reading the list of References from csproj files

Question

Does anyone know of a way to programmatically read the list of References in a VS2008 csproj file? MSBuild does not appear to support this functionality. I'm trying to read the nodes by loading the csproj file into an XmlDocument but, the XPath search does not return any nodes. I'm using the following code:

System.Xml.XmlDocument projDefinition = new System.Xml.XmlDocument();
        projDefinition.Load(fullProjectPath);

        System.Xml.XPath.XPathNavigator navigator = projDefinition.CreateNavigator();

        System.Xml.XPath.XPathNodeIterator iterator = navigator.Select(@"/Project/ItemGroup");
        while (iterator.MoveNext())
        {
            Console.WriteLine(iterator.Current.Name);
        }

If I can get the list of ItemGroups I can determine whether it contains Reference information or not.

Answer 1

The XPath should be /Project/ItemGroup/Reference, and you have forgot the namespace. I'd just use XLINQ - dealing with namespaces in XPathNavigator is rather messy. So:

    XNamespace msbuild = "http://schemas.microsoft.com/developer/msbuild/2003";
    XDocument projDefinition = XDocument.Load(fullProjectPath);
    IEnumerable<string> references = projDefinition
        .Element(msbuild + "Project")
        .Elements(msbuild + "ItemGroup")
        .Elements(msbuild + "Reference")
        .Select(refElem => refElem.Value);
    foreach (string reference in references)
    {
        Console.WriteLine(reference);
    }

Answer 2

Building on @Pavel Minaev's answer, this is what worked for me (notice the added .Attributes line to read the Include attribute)

XNamespace msbuild = "http://schemas.microsoft.com/developer/msbuild/2003";
    XDocument projDefinition = XDocument.Load(@"D:\SomeProject.csproj");
    IEnumerable<string> references = projDefinition
        .Element(msbuild + "Project")
        .Elements(msbuild + "ItemGroup")
        .Elements(msbuild + "Reference")
        .Attributes("Include")    // This is where the reference is mentioned       
        .Select(refElem => refElem.Value);
    foreach (string reference in references)
    {
        Console.WriteLine(reference);
    }

Answer 3

Based on @PavelMinaev's answer, I also added the "HintPath" Element to the output. I write the string array "references" to a ".txt" file.

XNamespace msbuild = "http://schemas.microsoft.com/developer/msbuild/2003";
            XDocument projDefinition = XDocument.Load(@"C:\DynamicsFieldsSite.csproj");
            var references = projDefinition
                .Element(msbuild + "Project")
                .Elements(msbuild + "ItemGroup")
                .Elements(msbuild + "Reference")
                .Select(refElem => (refElem.Attribute("Include") == null ? "" : refElem.Attribute("Include").Value) + "\n" + (refElem.Element(msbuild + "HintPath") == null ? "" : refElem.Element(msbuild + "HintPath").Value) + "\n");
            File.WriteAllLines(@"C:\References.txt", references);