Microsoft.NET.publish.targets does not respect property PublishableProject

In Microsoft.Common.CurrentVersion.targets there is a Publish target that checks the property PublishableProject and determines if the current project should be published or not. Unfortunately Microsoft.NET.publish.targets overrides this and does not check the property.

This means that there is no way to prevent a project from being published. Note that the NuGet targets have an IsPackable property that can be set in the project to prevent it from producing a nuget package. It would be great to either use the PublishableProject or IsPublishable to have the same control when publishing.

[mariusGundersen]

What I wish to be able to do is run

dotnet publish mySolution.sln

And get only the projects that I have marked as publishable to be published. This way the build script can be very simple, since it can be roughly this:

dotnet clean mySolution.sln
dotnet restore mySolution.sln
dotnet build mySolution.sln
dotnet pack mySolution.sln
dotnet publish mySolution.sln
dotnet nuget push **/bin/**/*.nupkg
myCustomDeploy **/bin/**/publish

This is obviously a simplification, but not by much. Having the publishability be declaratively stated in the project rather than specified in the build script makes the build script simpler.

[StefanBertels]

I have a solution with a class library project having TargetFrameworks (multiple) defined. If I call dotnet publish (without any parameters) for my solution (containing e.g. a netcoreapp3.1 console app and this library project) it fails even if I define <IsPublishable>false</IsPublishable> in the class library’s csproj.

Everything else seems to work. If I change TargetFrameworks to TargetFramework the error is gone – therefore my guess is that IsPublishable property gets checked too late.

My dotnet.exe --version shows 3.1.100.