MSBuild Team Blog
"Coding ... the boring bit between builds"
How To: Conditionally Apply Metadata to Items
Last week we got a great question over on our forum about applying metadata to items depending on a...
Author: Mike Fourie Date: 11/18/2005
MSBuild in Visual Studio Part 11: Other Special Targets
The last two entries walked through how the Compile target is used by the IDE to drive certain...
Author: Mike Fourie Date: 11/17/2005
MSBuild in Visual Studio Part 10: What Does MSBuild Have To Do With Intellisense?
In our last post we started to dig into how the Compile target is used by Visual Studio at design...
Author: Mike Fourie Date: 11/15/2005
A Pretty Picture of Our Project Dependencies
As you may have noticed from our recent posts on build parallelization, we're thinking a lot lately...
Author: Mike Fourie Date: 11/14/2005
How To: Update Assembly Version Numbers with MSBuild
UPDATE: For information on the "Y7K" or "2007" issue, see our new blog entry. One of our most...
Author: Mike Fourie Date: 11/11/2005
Sprint 9 Review
It’s been about a month since we last talked about Sprint 9, and it’s time for an update. If you...
Author: Mike Fourie Date: 11/11/2005
How To: Wrap Custom Targets Around a Solution Build
We got the following question on the msbuild@microsoft.com alias last week: I'm migrating from...
Author: Mike Fourie Date: 11/10/2005
MSBuild in Visual Studio Part 9: Compiling at Design-Time Using the In-Process Compiler
All the posts so far in our series have talked about reading from and writing to project files. I...
Author: Mike Fourie Date: 11/10/2005
Parallelizing Visual Studio solutions
One of the MSBuild Team’s scenarios for multi-proc builds is the automatic parallelization of Visual...
Author: Mike Fourie Date: 11/09/2005
MSBuild support for targeting the .NET FX 1.1 runtime
Being able to target .NET 1.1 has been by far the most popular request that we have heard from our...
Author: Mike Fourie Date: 11/09/2005
Restrictions on the Exclude attribute in an item tag
An item exclude only works with the corresponding include on the same actual item tag-- in other...
Author: Mike Fourie Date: 11/08/2005
MSBuild in Visual Studio Part 8: Writing Items To the Project File
Reading items from the project file, as we discussed in our last post, is quite straightforward and...
Author: Mike Fourie Date: 11/08/2005
How To: Customizing Project File Intellisense in Visual Studio
So Neil pointed out that you can find the MSBuild schemas in either the .NET Framework install path,...
Author: Mike Fourie Date: 11/08/2005
How To: Recursively Copy Files Using the Task
Have you ever run into a situation where you had to recursively copy files from one folder into...
Author: Mike Fourie Date: 11/07/2005
Channel 9 Video of the Team Build Team
We've mentioned Team Build a couple of times here in the past, and I discovered they have a video up...
Author: Mike Fourie Date: 11/07/2005
Where is the MSBuild schema file?
Every so often we get asked where the schema file is for the MSBuild XML. People (correctly) assume...
Author: Mike Fourie Date: 11/04/2005
How To: Escape the Percent Sign in MSBuild
This is actually somewhat amusing, especially considering our recent set of posts on escaping...
Author: Mike Fourie Date: 11/04/2005
MSBuild in Visual Studio Part 7: Reading Items From the Project File
I don’t know about everyone else, but I’m pretty sick of escaping and properties [:)] It’s time to...
Author: Mike Fourie Date: 11/03/2005
TeamBuild Properties and Targets
One of the neat things about MSBuild is how it can be customized by other people. The Team Build...
Author: Mike Fourie Date: 11/03/2005
MSBuild in Visual Studio Part 6: Quiz Answers, Round 2
If you’re joining us mid-stream, these are answers to a quiz on property escaping when saving...
Author: Mike Fourie Date: 11/01/2005
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...
Author: Mike Fourie Date: 10/31/2005
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...
Author: Mike Fourie Date: 10/29/2005
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...
Author: Mike Fourie Date: 10/27/2005
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...
Author: Mike Fourie Date: 10/25/2005
Now that's an article on MSBuild!
I was doing a random web search to find the MSDN information on Project.SetProperty(), and came...
Author: Mike Fourie Date: 10/25/2005
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...
Author: Mike Fourie Date: 10/25/2005
Find out more about Team Build!
Visual Studio Team Foundation includes a feature called "Team Build", which is essentially a build...
Author: Mike Fourie Date: 10/24/2005
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...
Author: Mike Fourie Date: 10/20/2005
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...
Author: Mike Fourie Date: 10/19/2005
A New Series: MSBuild in Visual Studio
Last week Rajeev gave a presentation on the integration between MSBuild and the Visual Studio. It...
Author: Mike Fourie Date: 10/17/2005
what happens before msbuild decides to build a target?
there are several elements to processing a target tag: processing its dependencies, processing the...
Author: Mike Fourie Date: 10/14/2005
Parallel builds scenarios and implementation ideas
The MSBuild Team has started thinking about adding multi-proc support to the MSBuild engine....
Author: Mike Fourie Date: 10/14/2005
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...
Author: Mike Fourie Date: 10/12/2005
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...
Author: Mike Fourie Date: 10/11/2005
PDC Session Slide Decks are Online
The slide-decks for the two MSBuild talks we presented at the conference have been available on-line...
Author: Mike Fourie Date: 10/11/2005
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...
Author: Mike Fourie Date: 10/10/2005
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...
Author: Mike Fourie Date: 10/07/2005
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...
Author: Mike Fourie Date: 10/06/2005
How To: Change the name of embedded .resources
Another interesting question came across the internal Visual Studio conversion mailing list...
Author: Mike Fourie Date: 10/06/2005
Sprint 9 Backlog: Platform Sprint
Here are the tasks we selected for the platform sprint. For those who aren't familiar, our platform...
Author: Mike Fourie Date: 10/04/2005
Sprint 9 Backlog: Dogfooding Sprint
Here are the tasks we selected for the Dogfooding sprint. For those who aren't familiar, our...
Author: Mike Fourie Date: 10/04/2005
Sprint 9 Backlog Selection Overview
Today we held our second backlog selection meeting for Sprint 9. We’re running Sprint 9 as two...
Author: Mike Fourie Date: 10/04/2005
How To: Create Item Groups on the Fly
Here's another good question from our internal Visual Studio build conversion alias: Suppose I have...
Author: Mike Fourie Date: 10/04/2005
How To: Concatenate files using MSBuild tasks
This came across the internal MSBuild discussion alias this week: How can I concatenate a bunch of...
Author: Mike Fourie Date: 09/29/2005
Editing MSBuild project files in Visual Studio
Being able to edit your Visual Studio generated projects is one of the fundamental goals of MSBuild....
Author: Mike Fourie Date: 09/28/2005
Cranking up the build verbosity in the IDE
We are often asked whether it's possible to crank up the build output verbosity when building inside...
Author: Mike Fourie Date: 09/28/2005
How To: Specify strong name signing for your assemblies on the command line
This question came across the internal MSBuild discussion alias today: My development team uses...
Author: Mike Fourie Date: 09/26/2005