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October 2005 - Posts

Monday, October 31, 2005 7:11 PM

MSBuild in Visual Studio Part 5: Quiz Answers, Round 1

Our last post included a short quiz on property escaping, and hopefully you found it somewhat entertaining. Since the answers to when and how we escape can get rather lengthy, the answers to the quiz are split across two posts. Let’s get right into part
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Sunday, October 30, 2005 1:10 AM

RTM Version of MSBuild is Now Available

With the release of .NET 2.0 you can now go and download the final version of MSBuild. We are included in the .NET 2.0 Redistributable . Of course, if you have an MSDN subscription you can go and download Visual Studio 2005, and we show up in that download
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Thursday, October 27, 2005 7:09 PM

MSBuild in Visual Studio Part 4: A Quiz on Project Escaping

When we last posted everything was looking pretty straightforward. At this point we know how the project system reads and writes properties from the project file. What we haven't talked about is the mess involved in escaping property values. During the
Posted by msbuild | 2 Comments
Tuesday, October 25, 2005 11:30 PM

Automating the Creation of Custom Tasks with TaskGenerator

It's pretty common to have a bunch of existing tools to include in a build process, and it can be rather a pain to hand-write classes to wrap each of them as proper MSBuild tasks. As we worked on converting the Visual Studio source code to build with
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Tuesday, October 25, 2005 7:22 PM

Now that's an article on MSBuild!

I was doing a random web search to find the MSDN information on Project.SetProperty(), and came across a super-detailed article on MSBuild. It has sample XML, flow charts, examples of console output, information on item groups, metadata, conditionals,
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Tuesday, October 25, 2005 7:03 PM

MSBuild in Visual Studio Part 3: How the IDE Writes Properties

In our last post we looked at how the project system uses MSBuild to read properties out of the project file. Now that we know how properties get into the project system, let’s take a look at how updated properties get pushed back to the project file.
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Monday, October 24, 2005 2:51 PM

Find out more about Team Build!

Visual Studio Team Foundation includes a feature called "Team Build", which is essentially a build lab in a box. It is built on top of MSBuild, with all sorts of interesting support for things like syncing source before a build, build verification, and
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Thursday, October 20, 2005 11:42 PM

How To: Install a custom target to a well-known location

This question came across our internal conversion alias today: We are deploying our own VS project templates and they use a custom .targets file. Since the user can install our bits anywhere they want, we can’t hardcode the path to the targets file in
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Wednesday, October 19, 2005 7:36 PM

MSBuild in Visual Studio Part 2: How the IDE Reads Properties

Many of the properties in an MSBuild project file show up directly within the Visual Studio environment. The most common place you’ll see the properties show up is in the project properties screen: How do these properties get from the MSBuild XML in the
Posted by msbuild | 2 Comments
Monday, October 17, 2005 3:11 PM

MSBuild in Visual Studio Part 1: Loading and Saving Project Files

One of the questions we get asked on occasion is how well manual changes to project files round trip through Visual Studio. If you invest a ton of effort into manually tweaking your project file with new targets, it really wouldn’t be fun if opening it
Posted by msbuild | 3 Comments
Monday, October 17, 2005 2:39 PM

A New Series: MSBuild in Visual Studio

Last week Rajeev gave a presentation on the integration between MSBuild and the Visual Studio. It was an absolutely fascinating view into the coupling between these two very important parts of working with VS, and over the next couple of weeks we’ll be
Posted by msbuild | 1 Comments
Friday, October 14, 2005 8:00 PM

what happens before msbuild decides to build a target?

there are several elements to processing a target tag: processing its dependencies, processing the condition, and performing TLDA (top level dependency analysis) or up-to-date checks. it can be confusing to figure out if a target will execute or not,
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Friday, October 14, 2005 7:19 PM

Parallel builds scenarios and implementation ideas

The MSBuild Team has started thinking about adding multi-proc support to the MSBuild engine. Currently MSBuild is single-threaded and does not take advantage of any opportunities for parallel processing during a build. However, most builds inherently
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Wednesday, October 12, 2005 7:43 PM

HOW TO: Beyond PreBuild and PostBuild Steps

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
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Tuesday, October 11, 2005 8:05 PM

Are you new to MSBuild? Check out our Hands-On-Lab

This MSBuild Hands-On-Lab introduces you to the fundamentals of MSBuild. It talks about the basics such as how to hand-author a simple MSBuild project file, and then builds on that to show you how to take it all the way to more advanced aspects such as
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Tuesday, October 11, 2005 7:26 PM

PDC Session Slide Decks are Online

The slide-decks for the two MSBuild talks we presented at the conference have been available on-line for a while now. Check them out: MSBuild - Architecting a Custom Build System by Rajeev Goel and MSBuild - Tips & Tricks by Faisal Mohamood are both
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Monday, October 10, 2005 6:10 PM

How To: Write a custom logger for MSBuild

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 interesting
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Saturday, October 08, 2005 12:51 AM

The ASP.NET team is working on a deployment project!

How cool is this? According to Paul Wilson , the ASP.NET team is working on a new web deployment project that plugs into Visual Studio and is based on MSBuild! We haven't seen a demo yet, but are scheduled to have one next Wednesday. After the demo we'll
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Thursday, October 06, 2005 10:08 PM

How To: Add a custom build action to Visual Studio

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
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Thursday, October 06, 2005 4:56 PM

How To: Change the name of embedded .resources

Another interesting question came across the internal Visual Studio conversion mailing list yesterday: Say I have assembly foo.dll, and in .csproj file I have <ItemGroup> <EmbeddedResource Include="bar.resx" /> </ItemGroup> Then, bar.resx
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Tuesday, October 04, 2005 9:57 PM

Sprint 9 Backlog: Platform Sprint

Here are the tasks we selected for the platform sprint. For those who aren't familiar, our platform work is about laying the foundation to enable multi-proc support. Overall roadmap for multi-proc build (critical) By roadmap we mean an outline of when
Posted by msbuild | 1 Comments
Tuesday, October 04, 2005 9:56 PM

Sprint 9 Backlog: Dogfooding Sprint

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 (critical)
Posted by msbuild | 90 Comments
Tuesday, October 04, 2005 9:55 PM

Sprint 9 Backlog Selection Overview

Today we held our second backlog selection meeting for Sprint 9. We’re running Sprint 9 as two separate sprints, one for internal conversion efforts and a second to lay the groundwork for multi-proc build* support. Since my original blog entry was getting
Posted by msbuild | 0 Comments
Tuesday, October 04, 2005 6:14 AM

How To: Create Item Groups on the Fly

Here's another good question from our internal Visual Studio build conversion alias: Suppose I have a target that produces an unpredictable number of output files and doesn’t use a Task Output to return that list to me. (Think compiling a .SLN file and
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