Not many books that are reviewed like this on Amazon: Now the heavily augmented second edition has just come out, written by several people at Microsoft and reviewed by the product team. New extensive coverage of building C++ with MSBuild...

We've had a few reports of cases where Visual Studio, and previous versions of MSBuild, will build the projects in the solution in the correct order, but the 4.0 version of MSBuild.exe gets the order wrong. Here's a full description of what's going...

Since the release of Visual Studio 2010 we have received a few reports of crashing behavior which can be traced back to issues with MSBuild. We’ve analyzed all of these and there are several particular cases where a crash can occur. We’ve...

In my last two posts ( here and here ) I showed how to enable the unsupported MSBuild debugger to debug a build started on the command line with MSBuild.exe. In this final post, I'll mention some other variations. Note that this blog is rather narrow...

In my previous post , I showed how to enable the hidden Visual Studio debugger for MSBuild script, and demonstrated it by stepping through the evaluation of a C# project. In this post, I'll keep debugging into the actual build of that project. Note...

Back when we started 4.0 development, I polled readers of the MSBuild blog to find out what features were most important to them. Debugging was #1 which was very surprising to us. Thinking about it more, it makes sense. In our team we've become so proficient...

Introduction In MSBuild 4 we introduced several performance improvements, particular for large interdependent builds. By and large they are automatic and you receive their benefit without making any changes to the way your build process in authored...

Assembly references are an integral part of build process. When the assembly references passed to the compiler are correct everything works but when they are not projects stop building. When this happens It can be frustrating to try and figure out why...

During the Visual Studio 2010 development cycle a push to make the build experience better on Cross compilation scenarios as well on making sure a build using 32-bit MSBuild was identical (in outputs) to a build using 64-bit MSBuild. In most cases, 64...

Some more information about this 4.0 feature. (I've also updated the first post with this, so everything's in one place for your reference.) Built-in MSBuild functions The full list of built-in [MSBuild] functions, like the one above, are in the MSDN...

Following extensive feedback on the decision to move the MSBuild blog to The Visual Studio Blog , a decision has been made to cross-post all MSBuild blog posts to this blog. All current MSBuild posts to The Visual Studio Blog have now been posted here...

Have you ever wanted to do something simple in a build, like get a substring of a property value, and found that MSBuild didn't have syntax for it? You then had to write a task for it, which was tiresome to do for such a simple operation. What's more...

In previous versions of MSBuild users could see the initial item and property values of projects in the build, this was useful to diagnose what values certain properties and items were set to. A requested addition to these items and properties was the...

A great way to get fast builds on a multiprocessor computer is to take advantage of as much parallelism in your build as possible. If you have C++ projects, there’s two different kinds of parallelism you can configure. What are the dials I can set...

Introduction When we were developing the current version of MSBuild, we spent a lot of time analyzing builds to determine where our performance issues lay. The standard logging, even on diagnostic verbosity and with the performance summary enabled...

I have had several customers asking me about MSBuild and how to get started learning the language and using it. A little over a year and a half ago, I joined the MSBuild team. When I got here, I did not even know what MSBuild was, and I have been a Visual...

One of the cool new features of MSBuild 4.0 is the extensible task factory. Task factories allow you to include scripts directly in your project file (or an imported .targets file) and have those scripts parsed and executed by your favorite interpreter...

Introduction With the release of .NET Framework 4 and Visual Studio 2010 comes MSBuild 4.0. Among the many great features in this version are new mechanisms to allow you (or your build lab) to extend the default build targets files with your own customizations...

If you have the RC build of VS2010, you are targeting the 3.5, 3.0, or 2.0 Framework, you have a VB or C# project which has a lot of references, and you also have a lot of .resx files, your build may break with an error message like this D:\Windows...

I had the distinct pleasure to meet up with Ken Levy and talk about MSBuild. Ken is responsible for the CodeCast interviews at code magazine . The interview consists of an in-depth technical and scenario discussion on how and why to use MSBuild, both...

We aren’t going away -- we’re just moving to a better home. To give you even more news, articles, and walkthroughs on Visual Studio, the MSBuild Team blog is moving to become part of The Visual Studio Blog . As part of The Visual Studio Blog , we’ll be...

Well the CTP is now out, and I hope all are enjoying a preview of the new features being released in Visual Studio 2010. Of particular interest is the walkthrough " How to Create an Inline Task ". In this walkthrough, " How to Create an Inline...

I am very happy to pass on news from Mike Fourie that has released v1 of a remarkably extensive MSBuild Extensions Pack on codeplex. In his words: The MSBuild Extension Pack is the successor to the FreeToDev MSBuild Tasks Suite and provides a collection...

Six months ago, the developers on MSBuild began to use an internal tool then called "StyleCop" in order to clean up our source code going forward. Think of it as a little like "FXCop" for your C# style. It flags as build warnings all kinds of deviations...

We have an infrastructure in developer division for performance measurement. Before a feature crew integrates into their product unit branch, or a product unit does one of their periodic integrations of changes into a main branch, they must pass RPS ...