MSBuild Tutorial Thomas Ardal. This article gives a comprehensive introduction to the MSBuild tool. MSBuild Basics. NET 2. MSBuild. MSBuild is primarily used to build. NET applications, but can be used for other types of applications as well. From Windows Vista, MSBuild is distributed with Windows itself, making it a strong platform for implementing scripted application on non developer PCs as well. VSTS TFS 2017. VSTSs package management works with the continuous integration tools your team already uses. In this Jenkins walkthrough, youll create a NuGet. All things ALM and TFS. Im trying to set up RM just now and am taking the tokenisation route but its not as straight forward as Id hoped. Before. NET 2. 0, application were built by one or more of these strategies Using the build menu from inside Visual Studio. Using the devenv. Using a third party tool like NAnt which MSBuild is based onThe drawback with the first two strategies was that they were hard to script. The drawback with the third solution was that two build environments had to be held in sync and maintained. NET 2. 0 Visual Studio projects are now implemented in the MSBuild language, but MSBuild has no dependencies on Visual Studio itself. MSBuild can, in theory, be implemented in files with any extension, but a number of formats seem to be the supported standard from Microsoft csproj, vbproj, vcproj, vjsproj, proj, and. The first four are different types of project files for Visual Studio, while the last two are new extensions, which are either written by hand or with a tool knowing the MSBuild syntax. A few tools exist for this purpose. My personal opinion is that building in xml editor in Visual Studio is quite good for this purpose. Email Receiver Software. A repeating question among MSBuild developers is if you should extend the files generated by visual studio with new stuff, or whether you should write your own containing your home made MSBuild scripts. My personal opinion is to let Visual Studio generate its own projects example csproj files and create your home made scripts in a. I usually start the. Clean, Build and Rebuild, which basically just calls the similar targets in the. This way, you avoid updating an auto generated file which you dont have control over. An MSBuild file is implemented in XML. The root element of an MSBuild XML file will always be a project containing target elements. It is possible to run multiple targets in an MSBuild file. When the MSBuild script is started from the command line, it takes a build file as parameter as well as the names of the targets, which should be executed. A target is implemented as a sequential list of tasks. The tasks are executed in the order in which they are specified beneath the target element. Both targets and tasks can be dependent on each other. This is an example of a very simple file to build a. NET project. lt Now you can execute the scripts either by doubleclicking on the batch files, or running them from the command prompt. You can check the respective log files for the. TxFYW.png' alt='Execute Batch File After Tfs Build Properties' title='Execute Batch File After Tfs Build Properties' />Project xmlnshttp schemas. Target NameBuild. Message TextBuilding msbuildintro. MSBuild Projectsmsbuildintro. TargetsBuild. Target. Project. The example defines a project with the MSBuild namespace. Using the namespace helps you develop the build file in Visual Studio using Intellisense. The build file contains a single target named Build. This target contains two tasks Message and MSBuild. Message outputs a message to the console and is used primarily for debugging purposes. MSBuild runs a configurable number of targets on another build file. Since the. csproj file is also implemented in MSBuild, we are able to call targets in the build file from the example build file. In this case, we call the target Build in the. All projects generated by Visual Studio automatically implement the Clean, Build and Rebuild targets. These targets are actually executed when you select the similar commands in the Build menu from within Visual Studio. Properties. To be able to parameterize a build script, MSBuild has implemented properties. A property is a simple keyvalue type, which can be used from multiple locations in the scripts. Lets look at an example using properties. Project xmlnshttp schemas. Property. Group. My. Release. Output. releaselt My. Release. Output. Property. Group. Target NameBuild. Message TextBuilding msbuildintro. MSBuild Projectsmsbuildintro. TargetsBuild. Target. Target NameRelease Depends. On. TargetsBuild. Make. Dir DirectoriesMy. Release. Output. Copy Source. Files. bindebugmsbuildintro. Destination. FolderMy. Release. Output. Target. Project. This example defines a property defined in a property group. Properties can be defined both outside and inside the scope of a target. When a property is defined as in this example, the value of the property is assigned before executing the actual targets. In this example, I define a property called My. Release. Output and add the value. I have added two targets as well Build and Release. The Build target is similar to the one specified in the previous example, while the Release target is new. The Release target introduces a new attribute called Depends. On. Targets, which is the way to define dependencies between targets in MSBuild. In this case, we tell MSBuild to run the Build target before running the Release targets. If you run the Build target manually before running the Release target, the Build target is run only once. The release target introduces two new tasks as well. Make. Dir, which well you guessed it creates a new directory and Copy, which copies on or more files from A to B. Make. Dir contains a single attribute, defining the path of the new directory. In this example that path is the value of the My. Release. Output property. Notice the use of the propertyname syntax here. MSBuild. The copy task in our example points out a single file and the destination folder where this file should be copied to when executing the Release target. The My. Release. Output used is again replaced by the value of this property. Items. The example above copied a single file from one directory to another. This can certainly be useful in many situations, but sometimes this is simply not flexible enough. This is where items come in. An item gives the possibility of creating dynamic lists of, for instance, file names. Lets start by looking at an example. Project xmlnshttp schemas. Property. Group. My. Release. Output. releaselt My. Release. Output. Property. Group. Item. Group. My. Release. Files Include. Item. Group. lt Target NameBuild. Message TextBuilding msbuildintro. MSBuild Projectsmsbuildintro. TargetsBuild. Target. Target NameRelease Depends. On. TargetsBuild. Make. Dir DirectoriesMy. Release. Output. Copy Source. FilesMy. Release. Files Destination. FolderMy. Release. Output. lt Target. Project. We start by defining an Item. Group outer scope of a target. This means that the content is calculated before actually running any targets. In this example, I define an Item. Group containing a single item called My. Release. Files. The item contains a single attribute called Include, which acts as a filter for the generated file list. In this case, all files beneath the bindebug directory. I use this item in the copy task beneath the Release target to indicate which files should be copied when doing a release. The Include filter decides which file to include. We also have the possibility to specify an Exclude filter. The following example shows how. Project xmlnshttp schemas. Property. Group. My. Release. Output. releaselt My. Release. Output. Property. Group. Item. Group. My. Release. Files Include. Exclude. bindebugshost.