[wix-devs] Message I attempted to send before today's online meeting

[Ron Martin]

I've come to the most powerful group of programmers I know in hopes of 
finding a clue that will help me continue to work on the project that 
has possessed me for the past four or more months.

The problem involves two segments of Wix4: libs and wix.

In libs, we find dutil.vcxproj. In wix, we find wixnative.vcxproj. DUtil 
is packaged as a nupkg file for consumption by wixnative. Both projects 
contain only native code.

As you might expect, my base commit has no problems with this setup. 
However, my much-modified working commit has a glaring problem: 
wixnative can't find dutil.h (among many other references) in dutil. It 
is properly laid out in my nuget cache, but nuget is not using 
WixToolset.DUtil.props (which is present) can generate the additional 
paths that enable the build process to succeed. These macros appear to 
be undefined (or empty), and the constructed paths are based on the path 
to wixnative.vcxproj, rather than the dutil image in my global nuget cache.

I've been using the binary log from msbuild and process monitor to get 
to where I am, but I can't see inside msbuild to figure out why one 
commit works and the other doesn't.

The documentation and Google-accessible commentary lead me to all kinds 
of information about using nuget, centralized package management, 
package reference and C++ together.

The problem occurs in Visual Studio 2019 and when building from the 
command line.

Please give me a clue where else I should look. Could it have anything 
to do with the tools version I'm using or some non-C++ interference from 
.net framework version changes? The original code does not use any of 
the suggestions I've found in my research, but my failures are the same 
with them and without them.

Ron