Visual Studio Toolbox Live - MSBuild: Beyond Building

Kevin Bost shows the underpinnings of MSBuild, how it works, and how you can use it to enhance your own build process.


#VisualStudio #MSBuild #dotnet

[ScottWadeSalemVa]

Great video and documentation. I had no idea you could customize msbuild so much. Can you point me in the right direction to show me how to configure msbuild to not overwrite a file when publishing, if the file on the destination site is newer.

[frddyfrsh]

I’m quite proficient in msbuild, and it’s a nightmare from decades ago.
It’s essentially a semi-procedural language, but written in XML.
You have variables (property = scalar, item = list), you kinda have methods (target) and a call hierarchy. You have nearly no intellisense. You have nearly no way to debug your xml, like breakpoints at a call target.
You have a prototype of a tool to analyse your build which is called Log Viewer.

The whole system is an algamation of makeshifts. And despite 20 years and all these additions it’s still horrible to develop in.

After writing js build scripts, i curse msbuild for it’s ancient and overly complicated and crude concept.

Only because msbuild is so crude, people use build tools in front of msbuild like cake or nuke.
No sane person tries to write build scripts in MS build, despite you need to integrate it into your build.

I would love to dump cake/nuke and just use msbuild, but 95% of the my colleagues would not understand it.

Please MS, dump this monstrosity and give us a build system which is appropriate for 2024.

[peternimmo]

I wish they would simplify the .vcxproj format in the same way as they've done with the .csproj in the Net.Sdk format