http://blogs.msdn.com/msbuild/archive/2005/10/27/484742.aspxWhen 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 theen-USCommunityServer 2.1 SP1 (Build: 61025.2)http://blogs.msdn.com/msbuild/archive/2005/10/27/484742.aspx#485940Fri, 28 Oct 2005 03:06:14 GMT91d46819-8472-40ad-a661-2c78acb4018c:485940Keith HillMy guess without trying this would be that only the last one needs to escape the &quot;$&quot; char in order to not replace $(configuration) with the value of the Configuration property. You mention semi-colon but I thought that had special meaning just in item lists and not in properties?http://blogs.msdn.com/msbuild/archive/2005/10/27/484742.aspx#485976Fri, 28 Oct 2005 04:26:11 GMT91d46819-8472-40ad-a661-2c78acb4018c:485976msbuildKeith, <br> <br>Thanks for taking a guess. I must admit I failed miserably on this quiz. <br> <br>Semi-colons are special in property groups too. You can see this with the &quot;DisabledWarnings&quot; property above, which gets passed into a task and the task expects to be able to treat it as a list of items. Another way to look at it is if you have a property in a task defined as ITaskItem[], you want to be able to accept both properties and items as an input, and still see them as individual array elements. <br> <br>I won't spill the beans on answers yet though... On Monday next week the first set of answers will go up (the answers were so long we broke them up across two posts). Check back then! <br> <br>Neil