Earlier this week I posted a little batching brainteaser from our internal team discussion list. If you have a cheesy drumroll sound on your computer now is the time to start playing it, 'cause here comes the answer: a) 0 Yep, that's right, zero...

... your classes show up on the .NET Framework class diagram poster. If you buy a copy of Visual Studio 2005 you get a pretty poster in the box that shows all the major classes in the .NET Framework, and MSBuild is on it! That's us under "Tools...

About once a week we get a question from someone who wants to know how to set the assembly version information on ASP.NET projects. I spoke with Bradley, a development lead over in the ASP.NET team who worked on the Web Deployment Projects , and it turns...

We got a question on our MSBuild Feedback alias today that went something like this: How do I obtain all the initial property values in the project file in my custom logger? It's not immediately obvious from our object model, but you can do this...

Every so often as we work through converting the Visual Studio builds over to MSBuild we stumble across a little quirk or entertaining bit of MSBuild XML that makes the team scratch its head. Dan sent this one around to the team a couple of weeks ago...

We got the following question on the MSBuild Discussion alias last week: I’m not sure why MSBuild support the concept of unqualified metadata. Is there a particular scenario where someone would rather use the ambiguous %(metadata) syntax as opposed...

While MSBuild is all about build customization,we never really blogged about what is involved in implementing custom tasks. Partly, I suppose that's because implementing a custom task is as easy as falling off a log most of the time: 1) Subclass Microsoft...

For easy reference here's a list of all the MSBuild in Visual Studio posts we ran over the last couple of months. If you enjoyed this series please drop us a short note and let us know. Look for another series, this time on the internals of Microsoft...

Several people have written our feedback alias with problems using the AssemblyInfoTask when the projects are under source code control. When the files are checked in the AssemblyInfo files are read-only, and the task fails with an error that the file...

The new year got off to a good start for us with the MSBuild Platform Sprint 11 Backlog selection meeting. Platform Sprint 10 was focused mostly on getting our Compatibility story in place. All of the work from the last sprint in terms of compatibility...

Faisal hinted at this in his last post , but it's worth calling out on its own: Sayed Hashimi has started up a new blog with his own insights and thoughts on MSBuild. You may have seen Sayed hanging around our forum and answering questions, too. The blog...

We got a great question at msbuild@microsoft.com last week: What is the preferred method to retrieve the version of the assembly that was just built via MSBuild? Post build, we would like to automatically create and copy the assembly(ies) to version...

One last little interesting piece of information on how Visual Studio uses MSBuild relates to the loading of project files. Each project file loaded shares the same MSBuild Engine object within Visual Studio. In addition, when we find a project-to-project...

Hi All - My colleague Neil Enns wanted me to drop a note about the fact that we've been experimenting with pair programming on the MSBuild team on certain tasks, and found it generally useful. I finally tried it out last week, pairing with Sumedh on...

Sayed Ibrahim Hashimi has written about a restriction that he ran into when using CreateProperty and CreateItem tasks to dynamically emit properties and items. The issue has to do with not being able to access items and properties that are created within...

Craig points out that the first CTP for MSBee went out early adopters last week. If you are interested, send an email to ddcpxsln@microsoft.com and get on the CTP! We look forward to your feedback as we continue to work on MSBee in the coming weeks...