Unmanaged DLL in desktop bridge app

Question

I have a WPF desktop bridge application. In this solution I have a C# project and a project for an unmanaged C++ dll. I manually added the dll project as a reference to the C# project by editing the csproj file. When building the whole solution, the created dll is then copied to the output directory of the C# project. But unfortunately this dll is not copied to the output directory of the package project:

MySolution\MyPackageProject\bin\x64\Debug\AppX\MySolution.

So when I start the application (MyPackageProject is the startup project), the DLL cannot be loaded because it is not found.

Is there any way to get the dll copied to the package output directory? I want to publish the application later and want to be sure that the dll is included in the msixupload file.

Answer 1

Hello @Heiko,

Welcome to Microsoft Q&A forum.

You can try to custom a Target in .csproj file like following to copy the file to destination folder automatically after building this project.

<Target Name="CopyFiles" AfterTargets="Build">
	<Copy 
		SourceFiles="XXXX\XXXX\xxxx.dll" 
		DestinationFolder="XXXX\XXXX" 
	/>
</Target>

Document: Copy task

Best Regards,

Tianyu

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