Add additional dependencies to Visual Studio's Project Dependencies

[ap0llo]

I have a repository (I cannot share unfortunately) where we modelled some additional dependencies between projects that cannot be replaced by project references.

Essentially, we have a custom type of "project references".
These references are evaluated by custom MSBuild targets to make information about the referenced project available in the build of the current project (e.g. the output path).
We don't use project references since we do not want to one project to influence the assembly and package dependencies of the other project.

Everything works as expected when building the project using dotnet build.

However, there are occasional build errors when building in Visual Studio.
These are caused by differences between how Visual Studio and MSBuild handle dependencies and Visual Studio seems to only read the ProjectReference items from the project.

To workaround, the dependencies currently must be modelled inside the solution file (via the ProjectDependencies project section) in addition to the project files which is error-prone.

Is there a way to tell Visual Studio about these additional dependencies ? Maybe some special item group that needs to be populated?

Any help with this would be highly appreciated.