Unreferenced assemblies are not being published to IIS using WebDeploy

Question

I'm using the latest version of Visual Studio 2022 (17.3.0) to publish an ASPNET (NET6) webapp to IIS.

I use a plugin system for some of the assemblies and these are not referenced in the main project. I need these assemblies published, so I added the following post-build events:

xcopy "$(SolutionDir)pathtoassembly\bin\Debug\net6.0\assemblyname.dll" "$(TargetDir)" /Y
xcopy "$(SolutionDir)pathtoassembly\bin\Debug\net6.0\assemblyname.pdb" "$(TargetDir)" /Y

I do the above for a number of assemblies. But a couple of these are not being published. The build process does copy the files into the main project's bin folder.

The temporary publish folder (\obj\Debug\net6.0\win-x64\PubTmp\Out) does not contain these files so therefore they are not being published. All other unreferenced assemblies which I copy in the post-build event are successfully being published.

Is there a reason certain files do not get published?

Answer 1

I was missing the following in the publish profile file:

<ItemGroup>
  <JobFiles Include="**\Plugins*">
    <Path>\Plugins</Path>
  </JobFiles>
</ItemGroup>
<Target Name="PrepublishScript" BeforeTargets="PrepareForPublish">
  <Copy SourceFiles="@(JobFiles)" DestinationFolder="$(PublishDir)\" SkipUnchangedFiles="false" />
</Target>

After adding the above, publishing works as expected.