How to count how many times an imported MS-Build property was referenced (read) by a project?

Question

How to count how many times an imported MS-Build property was referenced (read) by a project ?

For example one of the files imported by the MS-Build Project defines a sensitive property $(CipherNonce) like this:

</Project>
    <PropertyGroup>
            <CipherNonce>314159</CipherNonce>
    </PropertyGroup>
</Project>

I would like to determine how many times the $(CipherNonce) property was read/used (referenced) by this MS-Build Project, which also imports dozens of .targets files.

At the moment I am using the -preprocess[:filepath] option to generate a single, aggregated project file, which I am searching for references to $(CipherNonce) with a regex - but that is such a hack and it misses the references to this property, which are made by the VS IDE.

I also looked at this and this and this to no avail.

Answer 1

MSBuild currently doesn't track all property reads (just unassigned property reads and env var reads). That being said - if you'd need to track all property reads, you'd need to build your version of MSBuild and hook the read yourself (here)