MSBuild Team Blog

This question came across the internal conversion alias this morning: Is there a way to send errors to STDERROR? This simple little question provides a nice lead-in to a blog entry about custom loggers, so here we go :) Whenever something...

Being able to target .NET 1.1 has been by far the most popular request that we have heard from our customers - and I am very pleased to say that it is finally coming! Craig Lichtenstein is working on enabling this important scenario, and has blogged about...

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...

UPDATE: For information on the "Y7K" or "2007" issue, see our new blog entry . One of our most frequently asked questions is: "How do update my assembly version numbers at build time?". Unfortunately our answer has been "you can't". Until today, that...

Have you ever run into a situation where you had to recursively copy files from one folder into another as a part of your build process? We certainly have run into it a few times, and I thought I'd share with you a neat trick that involves the use of...

It’s been about a month since we last talked about Sprint 9, and it’s time for an update. If you recall, the MSBuild team was planning on two parallel sprints: one for platform investigations and one to support internal dogfooding efforts . Last Friday...

We got the following question on the msbuild@microsoft.com alias last week: I'm migrating from VS2003/NAnt to VS2005/MSBuild for my build solution, and want to create a custom project that does the following: Pre-build actions Sync my source...

There were over 80 responses to my recent post asking for feedback on where MSBuild should be heading (if the graph doesn't appear, it's here ). Thank you all for your thoughtful allocations! Let's go through each one in decreasing order of ...

Those of you who've been using the 3.0 Framework may have noticed a folder under Program Files called "Reference Assemblies". This folder contains those assemblies that ship with the 3.0 Framework which are useful for referencing during the design and...

So in my last post , I described the multi-targeting feature at a very high level. I discussed how there will be three frameworks that you can build "for", and how there will be two toolsets - i.e. .NET Framework 2.0 / MSBuild 2.0 toolset, and the .NET...

So far on this blog we’ve shown different ways can use MSBuild to tweak behavior from the command line, but never really talked about things you can do with MSBuild that will affect the Visual Studio user interface. Since managed projects in Visual Studio...

We got the following question on our internal conversion discussion alias today: Is there a way to exclude two or more items from an ItemGroup using the “exclude” attribute without using a wildcard? It turns out the way to do this wasn't clear...

Greetings MSBuilders! Orcas MSBuild introduces a new feature allowing build authors to build projects in parallel. To enable this feature we have introduced a new parameter to the MSBuild task called “BuildInParallel” and a new command line parameter...

Here are the tasks we selected for the Dogfooding sprint. For those who aren't familiar, our dogfooding work is all about converting all of Visual Studio's source code to build with MSBuild. Provide .targets files for building Managed C++ targets ...

MSBuild recognizes error messages and warnings that have been specially formatted by many command line tools that typically write to the console. For instance, take a look at the following error messages - they are all properly formatted to be MSBuild...

The arrival of 2007 bought a flurry of e-mails to the MSBuild team from people having trouble with the AssemblyInfoTask. The symptom is simple to describe - the builds start to fail with the following error: Error emitting 'System.Reflection.AssemblyVersionAttribute...

Back in November I wrote about a quick-and-dirty way to add custom build process into the standard Visual Studio build by overriding pre-defined targets that exist in Microsoft.Common.Targets. While this method works fine for internal build processes...

Here's another question from our internal conversion discussion alias that came through last week: Does the Delete task in MSBuild not use wildcards? The documentation doesn’t say anything about it but that seems to be the behavior I am seeing....

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...

We're currently planning for our next version (aka, "Dev10" - no code name this time) and subsequent releases. In that spirit, I'd like to do a quick poll of MSBuild aficionados to help us keep our "vision" for MSBuild aligned with yours, our customers...

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...

Do you use PreBuild and PostBuild steps that are provided in the IDE? You will find that they are still available in Visual Studio 2005 - but from within the IDE, you only get the ability to run command line batch files / scripts. Essentially, prebuild...

Disclaimer: Since I am talking about Orcas, and as of yet unreleased software, what follows is subject to change. So if you were curious enough to dig into what the October 2006 Orcas CTP contained, you might have seen something related to MSBuild...

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...

Hello there - sorry for the long absence, but we're back and hopefully I'll keep this going again. So there was a recent forum post about how property values that are specified from the command line are immutable - i.e. it is not straightforward to...