Avalon is flashy. Indigo is robust and extensible. Generics, iterators and anonymous methods make writing extensible code faster than ever. One of the workhorses that doesn’t get a lot of credit is MSBuild. There are so many things you have to do to get software out the door in your customers’ hands, so many things that I won’t bother enumerating them.

Doing them all automatically, the same way every time is a daunting task. In .NET 1.1, automating everything requires third-party tools, such as NAnt. The biggest disadvantage of any tool: VS integration. Visual Studio stores all the solution information in .sln and .*proj files; a third party tool either has to parse that file, which may be well-formed XML, but it certainly takes a lot more than an XML parser to interpret. Or, the tool requires you to add all that project info yourself.

With the new framework, that all changes: MSBuild is a completely new, XML-based tool that allows you to run arbitrary tasks related to your project. The biggest advantage? Visual Studio uses it. And uses it well.

However, you don’t see a lot about MSBuild in the blogs or articles, with the exception of the MSBuild blog. They have some really great articles, including a whole series on how Visual Studio uses MSBuild. One of their latest posts is about extending MSBuild with your own custom tasks.

Recommended.

Tags: .NET
This entry is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.