Add SkipAndroidAPK property to allow skipping producing an APK

[Youssef1313]

Sometimes, all a CI build needs is verifying that a project builds without errors. In those cases, producing an APK is a waste of time. This PR adds an option for that. Note that BuildingInsideVisualStudio can't be used because it can have too many other side effects.

[dellis1972]

Thanks for the PR.

I can see this being useful. I have some feedback on this PR as it is though.

First we tend to prefix MSBuild properties which are going to be public (i.e don't have an _ prefix) with Android.
So in this case it would be AndroidSkipBuildApk or something like that.
Also we have to document every public MSbuild property in build-properties.md.

One thing to note, there is allot of processing which happens just prior to building the apk. For example the final aapt2 linking call and some java invocations. So this PR would only allow you to verify the C# side of the build.

[Youssef1313]

Yes, for me the C# side of the build is what I do care about for now.

[jonathanpeppers]

I was immediately going to suggest -p:BuildingInsideVisualStudio=true, but seems like you already tried. 😄

[jonathanpeppers]

/azp run

[azure-pipelines]

Azure Pipelines successfully started running 1 pipeline(s).

[jpobst]

Is there an existing MSBuild target that could be called that would stop before producing the APK? I know we used to only build the .dll at Build time, and didn't produce an APK until Deploy time.

If not, should there be a public target for that? It feels like this should be a target instead of a property?

[dellis1972]

Is there an existing MSBuild target that could be called that would stop before producing the APK? I know we used to only build the .dll at Build time, and didn't produce an APK until Deploy time.

If not, should there be a public target for that? It feels like this should be a target instead of a property?

It was changed for .net 6 because the thinking was after a dotnet build you should be able to run the app, and publish is only used when creating the final release packages. I remember a long back and forth on this subject. I think we wanted to add a deploy command at one point, but that didn't happen.

[jpobst]

Coming back to this, there are existing targets that might be able to fulfill this use case, though they are dependent on what the goal is.

• CoreCompile: Compiles C# code
• CoreBuild: Compiles C# code, generates and compiles Java interop code, compiles to Dalvik

Example:

dotnet build Foo.csproj -t:CoreBuild