MSBuild Team Blog

"Coding ... the boring bit between builds"

Second edition of the MSBuild and Team Foundation Build book released

Not many books that are reviewed like this on Amazon: Now the heavily augmented second edition has...

Author: Mike Fourie Date: 01/05/2011

Incorrect solution build ordering when using MSBuild.exe

We've had a few reports of cases where Visual Studio, and previous versions of MSBuild, will build...

Author: Mike Fourie Date: 12/21/2010

MSBuild Known Issues

Since the release of Visual Studio 2010 we have received a few reports of crashing behavior which...

Author: Mike Fourie Date: 07/15/2010

Debugging MSBuild script with Visual Studio (3)

In my last two posts (here and here) I showed how to enable the unsupported MSBuild debugger to...

Author: Mike Fourie Date: 07/09/2010

Debugging MSBuild script with Visual Studio (2)

In my previous post, I showed how to enable the hidden Visual Studio debugger for MSBuild script,...

Author: Mike Fourie Date: 07/09/2010

Debugging MSBuild script with Visual Studio

Back when we started 4.0 development, I polled readers of the MSBuild blog to find out what features...

Author: Mike Fourie Date: 07/06/2010

Better Parallelism in MSBuild 4 with YieldDuringToolExecution

Introduction In MSBuild 4 we introduced several performance improvements, particular for large...

Author: Mike Fourie Date: 06/03/2010

Assembly Resolution in MSBuild and Visual Studio Series Introduction

Assembly references are an integral part of build process. When the assembly references passed to...

Author: Mike Fourie Date: 05/11/2010

Building on Cross targeting scenarios and 64-bit MSBuild

During the Visual Studio 2010 development cycle a push to make the build experience better on Cross...

Author: Mike Fourie Date: 05/07/2010

MSBuild Property Functions (2)

Some more information about this 4.0 feature. (I've also updated the first post with this, so...

Author: Mike Fourie Date: 05/05/2010

A brief MSBuild Blog Note

Following extensive feedback on the decision to move the MSBuild blog to The Visual Studio Blog, a...

Author: Mike Fourie Date: 04/18/2010

MSBuild Property Functions

Have you ever wanted to do something simple in a build, like get a substring of a property value,...

Author: Mike Fourie Date: 04/02/2010

Displaying Target Output Items Using The Console Logger

In previous versions of MSBuild users could see the initial item and property values of projects in...

Author: Mike Fourie Date: 03/31/2010

Tuning C++ build parallelism in VS2010

A great way to get fast builds on a multiprocessor computer is to take advantage of as much...

Author: Mike Fourie Date: 03/07/2010

MSBuild 4 Detailed Build Summary

Introduction When we were developing the current version of MSBuild, we spent a lot of time...

Author: Mike Fourie Date: 03/05/2010

Getting Started with MSBuild

I have had several customers asking me about MSBuild and how to get started learning the language...

Author: Mike Fourie Date: 02/25/2010

MSBuild Task Factories: guest starring Windows Powershell

One of the cool new features of MSBuild 4.0 is the extensible task factory. Task factories allow you...

Author: Mike Fourie Date: 02/20/2010

Build Extensibility with .NET Framework 4

Introduction With the release of .NET Framework 4 and Visual Studio 2010 comes MSBuild 4.0. Among...

Author: Mike Fourie Date: 02/18/2010

If your build fails with “MSB6002: The command-line for the “ResGen” task is too long”

If you have the RC build of VS2010, you are targeting the 3.5, 3.0, or 2.0 Framework, you have a VB...

Author: Mike Fourie Date: 02/15/2010

MSBuild Interview on CodeCast

I had the distinct pleasure to meet up with Ken Levy and talk about MSBuild. Ken is responsible for...

Author: Mike Fourie Date: 01/22/2010

The MSBuild Team Blog Is Moving!

We aren’t going away -- we’re just moving to a better home. To give you even more news, articles,...

Author: Mike Fourie Date: 11/13/2009

Inline Tasks CTP Walkthrough Update

Well the CTP is now out, and I hope all are enjoying a preview of the new features being released in...

Author: Mike Fourie Date: 10/31/2008

MSBuild Extensions Pack releases to web

I am very happy to pass on news from Mike Fourie that has released v1 of a remarkably extensive...

Author: Mike Fourie Date: 10/14/2008

Microsoft Source Analysis releases to web

Six months ago, the developers on MSBuild began to use an internal tool then called "StyleCop" in...

Author: Mike Fourie Date: 05/23/2008

What's up with xxx.sln.cache?

We have an infrastructure in developer division for performance measurement. Before a feature crew...

Author: Mike Fourie Date: 02/11/2008

Article in .NET Developer's Journal

There's a new article by Xin Yan and myself published in the .NET Developer's Journal. We cover...

Author: Mike Fourie Date: 01/07/2008

More tools...

Two new MSBuild community tools to check out! Eugene from Attrice has blogged about the...

Author: Mike Fourie Date: 12/03/2007

Response to the feature poll

There were over 80 responses to my recent post asking for feedback on where MSBuild should be...

Author: Mike Fourie Date: 11/30/2007

MSBuild 3.5 "Orcas" has now shipped

MSBuild 3.5 "Orcas" has now shipped. You can get the free download from here. It's included in the...

Author: Mike Fourie Date: 11/21/2007

How would you spend $100 on MSBuild?

We're currently planning for our next version (aka, "Dev10" - no code name this time) and subsequent...

Author: Mike Fourie Date: 11/17/2007

What are Targets, Tasks, and Tools?

I've heard these confused in the context of MSBuild, so let's talk a little about what they are: * A...

Author: Mike Fourie Date: 11/14/2007

Manifest resource names changed for .resources files

Juergen Bayer notified us of an issue introduced in MSBuild in .NET 3.5 "Orcas". The problem is if...

Author: Mike Fourie Date: 10/19/2007

Using MSBuild as a generic scripting language

I just got a pretty interesting mail from Dave Hickey at Premera, describing how his team is using...

Author: Mike Fourie Date: 10/19/2007

Multitargeting against .NET 2.0

If you're using the new VS 2008 multitargeting features to target .NET 2.0 you should be aware that...

Author: Mike Fourie Date: 10/09/2007

ToolsVersion metadata for items used in MSBuild task's

Greetings MSBuilders! In Visual Studio 2005 you could only target the 2.0 Framework tools. MSBuild...

Author: Mike Fourie Date: 07/17/2007

Properties and AdditionalProperties metadata for items used in MSBuild task's

Greetings MSBuilders! Passing properties to projects specifically when you want to pass different...

Author: Mike Fourie Date: 07/17/2007

New Registry syntax in MSBuild v3.5

During development of the multi-targeting feature of the next version of MSBuild, we found it...

Author: Mike Fourie Date: 05/04/2007

Building projects in parallel

Greetings MSBuilders! Orcas MSBuild introduces a new feature allowing build authors to build...

Author: Mike Fourie Date: 04/26/2007

Caching Behaviour in Orcas msbuild

Greetings MSBuilders! Orcas MSBuild introduces a new parameter for the CallTarget and MSBuild task...

Author: Mike Fourie Date: 04/26/2007

Node Reuse in MultiProc MSBuild

Greetings MSBuilders! With the MultiProc support in MSBuild Orcas (now available in Visual Studio...

Author: Mike Fourie Date: 04/16/2007

Recursion, and ItemGroups inside Targets

Greetings MSBuilders! An internal team (Office Live, I think) asked us how to make their build start...

Author: Mike Fourie Date: 04/13/2007

Window tab management in Visual Studio

Greetings MSBuilders! The way in which Visual Studio inserts and drops document tabs arouses...

Author: Mike Fourie Date: 04/13/2007

New Reference Assemblies Location

Those of you who've been using the 3.0 Framework may have noticed a folder under Program Files...

Author: Mike Fourie Date: 04/12/2007

Why are build numbers limited to 65535?

In my previous post I explained how to fix the issue with the default date format provided in the...

Author: Mike Fourie Date: 01/03/2007

Fixing invalid version number problems with the AssemblyInfoTask

The arrival of 2007 bought a flurry of e-mails to the MSBuild team from people having trouble with...

Author: Mike Fourie Date: 01/03/2007

7 Steps to MSBuild

Brennan has a great post about all things MSBuild, and covers good breadth on both concepts, as well...

Author: Mike Fourie Date: 12/04/2006

Multi-Targeting : How does it work?

So in my last post, I described the multi-targeting feature at a very high level. I discussed how...

Author: Mike Fourie Date: 11/14/2006

MSBuild, Orcas, and Multi-targeting

Disclaimer: Since I am talking about Orcas, and as of yet unreleased software, what follows is...

Author: Mike Fourie Date: 11/02/2006

MSBuild / Visual Studio aware error messages and message formats

MSBuild recognizes error messages and warnings that have been specially formatted by many command...

Author: Mike Fourie Date: 11/02/2006

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