resolve-project-references

Original：🇺🇸 English

Translated

Guide for interpreting ResolveProjectReferences time in MSBuild performance summaries. Only activate in MSBuild/.NET build context. 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.

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Sourcedotnet/skills

Added on2026-04-06

NPX Install

npx skill4agent add dotnet/skills resolve-project-references

SKILL.md Content

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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

Guide the user to use the Task Performance Summary instead:

bash

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