Publicise

An MSBuild Task that creates copies of assemblies in which all members are public.

This is useful for easily referencing non-public members without the hassles or associated performance hits of reflection.

Usage

1. Install the NuGet Package.

2. Create the MSBuild Target. Properties are:
   InputAssemblies: Assemblies to be publicized.
   OutputPath: The folder to which publicized assemblies will be saved.
   PubliciseCompilerGenerated: If true, compiler generated members will be publicized. Defaults to false.

   Recommended Targets:
   AfterTargets="Clean": Will only execute on a clean or rebuild.
   BeforeTargets="BeforeBuild": Will execute before every build.

   Complete example of usage:

   <Target Name="Publicise" AfterTargets="Clean">
      <ItemGroup>
         <PubliciseInputAssemblies
            Include="
   	       PathTo/Assembly1.dll;
                  PathTo/Assembly2.dll"/>
      </ItemGroup>
   
      <Publicise
         InputAssemblies="@(PubliciseInputAssemblies)"
         OutputPath="../lib/"
         PubliciseCompilerGenerated="true"/>
   </Target>
   

3. Ensure Unsafe Code is enabled. If it is not enabled, runtime access violations will be encountered in certain situations.

4. Change your project references to AssemblyName_public.dll, which will be located in the OutputPath folder (after the task is executed at least once).

5. The task stores a hash of the assemblies to reduce build time when there is nothing new to compute. If you need to re-publicise the assembly when it has not changed, simply delete the corresponding x.hash file located next to the x_public.dll assembly.

Credits

Code based on this task, with original idea (to my knowledge), from this repository.