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I have been wrestling with this for a few days and after tons of searching I can't find the path I should be on. What I want to do is set up an MSBUILD project that will build our entire .NET application (constst of 8 solutions, and maybe 250 projects split up between them) with a number of settings overridden from the individual project files to make a debug build for myself. Specifically I want to build our release configuration with optimizations off and full debug info / pdbs generated. Also, in order to reduce our currently ultra-long build time I want "copy local" (or private in the actual proj file xml) false for every reference of every project. The first things were fairly easy, I can override a project level property fairly easily (you can even do this from the MSBuild command line using /p), but what I can't figure out is how to override a property on a reference. I have tried several things I saw here on StackOverflow and around the web, but nothing is a solution yet. I can do what I want by altering Microsoft.Common.targets, commenting out the code in the _CopyFilesMarkedCopyLocal target completely skips the copying of these files. But I don't want to alter my global configuration and do this in all circumstances. I created my own alternate targets file -- which works if I alter an individual project file to point to it -- but I can't figure out how to specify this to be used at the top level (my .proj file that just builds all 8 solutions). It would be great if I could somehow override just the _CopyFilesMarkedCopyLocal target at the top level so that if MS changes the default targets file my build isn't screwed up, but I can't figure out how to make this work either. The best possible thing would be if there was a way to just override reference level properties like you can project level properties, without having to rewrite/override the build targets stuff -- but I have found no information indicating

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