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 re

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 references = projDefinition
        .Element(msbuild + "Project")
        .Elements(msbuild + "ItemGroup")
        .Elements(msbuild + "Reference")
        .Select(refElem => refElem.Value);
    foreach (string reference in references)
    {
        Console.WriteLine(reference);
    }