MSBuild - Publishing a WebForms project with references to other WebForms project

Question

I have an ASP.NET webforms project (A) which references two other webforms projects (B and C) that I'm trying to publish with precompilation enabled from the command line with MSBuild using a publish profile (.pubxml). I need to be able to script this for our build pipeline to create the appropriate artifact for a security scan.

I can publish project A from Visual Studio just fine; it precompiles and outputs in bin/app.publish as expected.

When I run the following MSBuild command it creates the app.publish directory with a _PublishedWebsites directory containing projects A, B, and C without precompilation.

msbuild .\path\to\projectA.csproj /p:DeployOnBuild=true /p:PublishProfile=MyPublishProfile /p:OutputPath=$(pwd)\app.publish

MyPublishProfile.pubxml:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<!--
https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=208121.
-->
<Project>
 <PropertyGroup>
 <DeleteExistingFiles>true</DeleteExistingFiles>
 <ExcludeApp_Data>true</ExcludeApp_Data>
 <LaunchSiteAfterPublish>true</LaunchSiteAfterPublish>
 <LastUsedBuildConfiguration>Debug</LastUsedBuildConfiguration>
 <LastUsedPlatform>Any CPU</LastUsedPlatform>
 <PublishProvider>FileSystem</PublishProvider>
 <PublishUrl>bin\app.publish\</PublishUrl>
 <WebPublishMethod>FileSystem</WebPublishMethod>
 <_TargetId>Folder</_TargetId>
 <SiteUrlToLaunchAfterPublish />
 <PrecompileBeforePublish>true</PrecompileBeforePublish>
 <EnableUpdateable>false</EnableUpdateable>
 <DebugSymbols>true</DebugSymbols>
 <WDPMergeOption>CreateSeparateAssembly</WDPMergeOption>
 <UseFixedNames>true</UseFixedNames>
 </PropertyGroup>
</Project>

The only difference for projects B and C is that PrecompileBeforePublish is set to false in the .pubxml because I get assembly binding errors when it tries to precompile them.

Is there a way to direct MSBuild that I only want project A published, the way Visual Studio does?

• Albert D. Kallal: Not clear what benefits are by having multiple web site projects in one project. You still in theory required to deploy/publish each project as separate anyway, so I don't know what you gain here. If you looking to share code, then move that code out to a separate class of which then any and all of the 3 projects can reference that "code only" class project - and that will work correctly. Regardless, you would have to configure each subfolder as a whole new "separate" site anyway - once again, I see little benefits here. Sharing some common code in a new project class is easy, and works well.