How do I generate .Designer.cs files from resx files as part of dotnet build

Question

.Designer.cs files are generated automatically by Visual Studio or Rider (and probably other IDEs), but it is not a part of build process. I want to generate these files as a part of build process using dotnet build. That way I don't have to put these generated files to source control where they cause a lot of conflicts. How to achieve this?

Answer 1

The original inclusion in templates and examples in .csproj project files looks like this:

<ItemGroup>
  <EmbeddedResource Update="Resources\Resource.resx">
    <Generator>PublicResXFileCodeGenerator</Generator>
    <LastGenOutput>Resource.Designer.cs</LastGenOutput>
  </EmbeddedResource>
</ItemGroup>

This generates the Resource.Designer.cs in IDEs like described in the question using PublicResXFileCodeGenerator.

To generate the file in build process requires a bit more configuration, and you have to know the generated class and namespace names:

<EmbeddedResource Update="Resources\Resource.resx">
  <Generator>MSBuild:Compile</Generator>
  <StronglyTypedFileName>
    $(IntermediateOutputPath)\Resource.Designer.cs
  </StronglyTypedFileName>
  <StronglyTypedLanguage>CSharp</StronglyTypedLanguage>
  <StronglyTypedNamespace>Example.Resources</StronglyTypedNamespace>
  <StronglyTypedClassName>Resource</StronglyTypedClassName>
</EmbeddedResource>

Here the generator is the build process, StronglyTypeFileName tells the path where the .Designer.cs file is generated to (obj-folder), language that is used (in my case C#) and finally the namespace and class name. If you have multiple resource files for instance for different languages, you might have Resource_en as a class name for English.

Solution adapted from https://github.com/dotnet/msbuild/issues/2272 I also found a good blog post describing the solution here https://www.paraesthesia.com/archive/2022/09/30/strongly-typed-resources-with-net-core/