MSBuild Team Blog

This came across the internal MSBuild discussion alias this week: How can I concatenate a bunch of individual files into a single file during my build process? It looks like the ReadLinesFromFile and WriteLinesToFile tasks will do what I want, but...

Being able to edit your Visual Studio generated projects is one of the fundamental goals of MSBuild. Being able to edit your project file to customize and extend is not something that just happened to work :) MSBuild and Visual Studio 2005 were designed...

We are often asked whether it's possible to crank up the build output verbosity when building inside the IDE....think building from the command line using msbuild /verbosity:Detailed or msbuild /v:Detailed Sure, it's possible, and we've made it dead...

Yesterday I was complaining to Kieran about how hard it was to debug a custom task. When working on my AssemblyInfo task I was debugging all my regular expressions by running them in a separate command-line app, and with Log.LogMessage() calls in the...

Yesterday was our Dogfooding Sprint 8 review. For those that aren’t familiar, we use the SCRUM agile development methodology to run our efforts around dogfooding . Even though the work we do in our dogfooding sprints is heavily focused on internal adoption...

This question came across the internal MSBuild discussion alias today: My development team uses project files on their desktop for development, but we build the final assemblies in our build lab. How can we strong-name sign the files in our build lab...

One of the advantages to using MSBuild is the smarts it has to do reliable incremental builds. One pitfall you might hit when writing your own custom .targets file is that changes to your targets file don't cause a rebuild. In general, if you're changing...

I was messing around today with my latest custom task (more on that later, as soon as I can find somewhere to post it), and needed to find a way to tell the target that it depended on the actual project file. I wanted to force the target, and by extension...

One of the things we have been aggressively pursuing for a sometime now is the use of MSBuild within the Visual Studio build labs - i.e. using MSBuild to build the very bits of Visual Studio 2005 that you know and love and use today! Dan Moseley from...

If you'll be attending the MVP Summit in Redmond next week we'll have some members of the MSBuild team on-hand at the DevDiv Product Group fair on Thursday night. While we unfortunately don't have any sessions during the summit, we are more than happy...

Sara posted about MSBuild this week, and the post made the front page of http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/ . This is our first big MSBuild exposure on the front page of the Visual Studio developer center, and we're rather excited! You can view the...