I promised this post for the talk I gave at the Victoria .NET Developers Association Code Camp. This post is a bunch of pointers to good stuff about MSBuild that I collected for my talk.
- Introduction to MSBuild – this is a great introductory article on MSBuild, which covers the main points of my talk very well.
- MSBuild Blog – I’ve extolled the virtues of the MSBuild blog before. They are probably the best resource for when you rub up on a corner of MSBuild with which you’re comfortable; I’ve found very few of those.
- AssemblyInfoTask – Here’s a task for controlling the versioning of your assemblies for daily builds and the like.
- Channel 9 MSBuild Wiki – a good place for quick how-to articles
- MSDN Main Page for MSBuild – that’s pretty self-explanatory, eh?
- MSBuild Task Reference – pointer to the default tasks that ship with MSBuild.
- MSBuild Community Tasks – a great open source project that has a whole host of useful tasks, and integrates superbly with your development environment: a help file, a dll xml doc file, and schema extensions so their custom tasks show up in Intellisense when editing MSBuild files.
- Microsoft UK Solutions Build Framework – Another collection of 170 custom tasks! Wow.
- Integrating MSBuild with CruiseControl.NET – integrating MSBuild with everyone’s favourite free .NET continuous integration server.
- Using MSBuild and ILMerge to Package User Controls for Reuse – I include this as an example of the possibilities that MSBuild’s task model allows you to do without writing any code. Plus, Scott is someone you should be reading.
- MSBee Beta 2 Home – Target the .NET Framework 1.1 with this toolkit written by MS employees. Haven’t used it yet, but I hear good things. This would be a sweet situation: use VS 2005’s cool features (snippets, templates, etc) and build to 1.1 because you have to support your clients on that framework. I’ll have to try that out sometime. It really shows off the power of the extensibility model.
- MSBuild Team Blog : Post Summary: MSBuild in Visual Studio – A great series of articles detailing how VS uses MSBuild under the covers. This summary article points to all of them.
Enjoy. If you see any more good ones, leave it in the comments.
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