MSBuild Integration in Visual Studio

Question

I am a solo developer working with Visual Studio 2008 and learning MSBuild to improve the build process.

Almost all the tutorials I have found so far contain a lot of information about writing an assembly file. However, I have a lot of problems with how to integrate MSBuild into Visual Studio. Maybe MSBuild is only used with something like CruiseControl, but it's too complicated for me as a single developer.

Where should the build file be in the Visual Studio project and how can I run it from the IDE?

Answer 1

Visual Studio automatically launches MSBuild for supported projects.

If you right-click on a project and upload it, you can edit it in Visual Studio. Reboot (right click on the project again), force (re) build to check your changes. An alternative is to edit the project file in an external editor, and Visual Studio will detect the save and offer to reload the project for you.

It looks like you're on the right track, and if you plan on writing Targets or custom MSBuild tasks, take the time to separate them from your current project so that you can reuse them. However, don’t redo the wheel, but two main additional MSBuild projects: MSBuild Community Tasks and MSBuild Extension Pack .

Update: Judging by the comments of Mitch, you can also consider adding a new configuration item or custom properties to the project. The new MSBuild configuration (something other than the default Debug / Release) can run unit tests, build documentation, or whatever you want to automate. The custom MSBuild property allows you to use the usual Debug / Release configuration and extend it to automate more of the build process, it just depends on what you want. Any of these approaches can also be inferred from the command line .

Answer 2

As others have noted, MSBuild is already available when installing Visual Studio.

If you want to integrate into VS2008: Starting MSBuild from Visual Studio

Answer 3

MSBuild is the build engine used by Visual Studio to process files included in the project.
The Visual Studio project itself creates the files (**. Csproj * for C # and .vbproj for VB, for example) are actually MSBuild scripts that run each time the project is created.

Answer 4

Your .csproj file is an MSBuild file. That way you are actually using it already.

Of course, you can create a separate build file to have more control options, especially as part of continuous integration or nightly builds.

If you just want to edit the project assembly file, you can use the IDE to edit some parameters, such as the actions before and after the assembly, or edit the Xml itself by unloading the project and right-clicking and editing it.

Answer 5

You can use your current .vcproj files to create your project using MSBuild. However, since MSBuild is not directly supported (at least for vC ++), it is used (internally) instead of vcbuild. In VS2010, all project files are based on MSBuild ...

Answer 6

This is an older article about some simple extension points from the msbuild command.

A practical guide. Insert a user process at specific points during assembly

Answer 7

Also, don't forget that you can use MSBuild SideKick to develop and debug your (local) msbuilds, available for free http://www.attrice.info/msbuild/

Answer 8

I would suggest you call msbuild as the post build phase. Then you can place your script construct somewhere in your solution and call it.

<windowsdir>\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v3.5\MSBuild.exe c:\temp\MyProject\mybuildfile.proj 

Answer 9

The easiest way is probably to invoke your custom build script using the post-build step. Right click on the project, select "Build Events" and invoke msbuild with your custom msbuild file.

Answer 10

I am using msbuild template to interact with visual studio

http://msbuildtemplate.codeplex.com/