Hack the Build: What’s New in Beta2?
Jomo Fisher – We added a bunch of stuff to MSBuild for Beta2—there’s plenty in there for several blog entries. For now, here are a few little features we added in Beta2 that I find really handy.
Diagnostic Logging
You can now turn on MSBuild diagnostic logging from within VS. Go to “Tools\Options\Projects and Solutions\Build and Run\MSBuild project build output verbosity” and dial in the level of detail you want. This can be handy for figuring out what’s really going on under the hood during builds.
Performance Logging
If you set the verbosity to diagnostic and build one of the nice bits of information you get is a performance summary broken out by Project, target, task. Something like:
Project Performance Summary:
0 ms MyProj1.csproj 2 calls
0 ms MyProj2.csproj 2 calls
1515 ms MyProj3.csproj 1 calls
Target Performance Summary:
0 ms SplitResourcesByCulture 1 calls
0 ms BeforeResolveReferences 1 calls
// Stuff removed
109 ms CopyNonResxEmbeddedResources 1 calls
578 ms CoreResGen 1 calls
625 ms CoreCompile 1 calls
Task Performance Summary:
0 ms AssignTargetPath 5 calls
0 ms GetFrameworkPath 1 calls
0 ms CreateProperty 8 calls
// Stuff removed
109 ms Copy 4 calls
578 ms GenerateResource 1 calls
625 ms Csc
If you’re creating your own build scripts, writing your own tasks, or modifying the targets files that came with VS, this is a handy way to see what’s called and where the time is going.
Color Logging
Drop down to the command line and build one of your projects with MSBuild.exe. The look and feel of the text output has been significantly improved. Importantly, errors are now shown in red and warnings yellow. This makes it much easier to pick out build issues from the rest of the information.
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