Dan Moseley, a developer on the MSBuild team, wants to know how you would prioritize features for the next version of MSBuild by asking, How would you spend $100 on MSBuild?  The release of Visual Studio 2008 is imminent, which means the product teams are beginning to work on the future, and he posts about some of the features that they are considering.

How would you spend $100 on MSBuild?

We’re currently planning for our next version (aka, “Dev10” – no code name this time) and subsequent releases. In that spirit, I’d like to do a quick poll of MSBuild aficionados to help us keep our “vision” for MSBuild aligned with yours, our customers.

First, a caveat – while ideally I would like to rank the results and work down the list, the reality is that we have other constraints: although we are a separate build platform, our biggest customer by far is Visual Studio and its customers. There’s a lot more Visual Studio users than direct MSBuild users, so when Visual Studio needs to add a feature that requires work on MSBuild, we have to help. Then there’s other constraints, like team resources. There’s no guarantee which of these will appear in what version, and some of them may not be worth any investment. Some of them I just made up.

OK. Here’s some brainstormed features.

more…

This is a great opportunity to influence the future of MSBuild, so be sure to post your opinion.  I’ve posted my own take on this in the comments to Dan’s post.