Buck Hodges

Azure DevOps (formerly VSTS and Team Foundation Server)

MSBuild - Buck Hodges

A tool to find duplicate copies in a build

January 21, 2012 Jan 21, 2012 01/21/12
Buck Hodges
As part of our builds, quite a few projects copy files to the binaries directory or other locations.  These can be anything from image files to test scripts.  To have our builds complete more quickly, we use the multi-process option (/maxcpucount) of msbuild to build projects in parallel. This all sounds normal, so what’s the ...

The book to buy on team build: Using MSBuild and Team Foundation Build, Second Edition

February 13, 2011 Feb 13, 2011 02/13/11
Buck Hodges
If you are responsible for work with your team’s build system, you will definitely want to buy a copy of Inside the Microsoft Build Engine: Using MSBuild and Team Foundation Build (Second Edition).  Both of the authors now work for Microsoft.  William Bartholomew is part of the central engineering team and has been building the ...

How to use the MSBuild debugger in Visual Studio 2010

July 17, 2010 Jul 17, 2010 07/17/10
Buck Hodges
Dan Moseley, dev lead for msbuild, wrote a debugger for msbuild while on leave(!) back during the 2010 cycle.  While it ultimately couldn’t be fully completed and tested to be an official feature, it is in the product with a switch to enable it (it’s off by default).  This was a conscious decision made by the VS team, and...

Debug your build with MSBuild Sidekick v2.3

March 30, 2009 Mar 30, 2009 03/30/09
Buck Hodges
The folks at Attrice have released a new version of their MSBuild Sidekick, and it now includes a visual debugger for msbuild.  If you've ever tried to debug a build process, you know how tedious it can be and will want to check this out. MSBuild Sidekick v 2.3 is released We are happy to announce the release of version 2.3 of ...

MSBuild Extensions Pack now available

October 19, 2008 Oct 19, 2008 10/19/08
Buck Hodges
Mike Fourie has released the first version of MSBuild Extensions Pack on CodePlex.  This is a great collection of quality tasks for MSBuild that you can also use in Team Foundation Build. The MSBuild Extension Pack is the successor to the FreeToDev MSBuild Tasks Suite and provides a collection of over 170 MSBuild tasks designed for the...

MSBuild project analysis tool: BuildCop

March 18, 2008 Mar 18, 2008 03/18/08
Buck Hodges
Jelle Druyts has created an interesting tool and made it available on CodePlex. Just Released: BuildCop v1.0! It is with great pleasure that I'm finally ready to release another open source tool on CodePlex: BuildCop. BuildCop is a tool that analyzes MSBuild project files (interactively or during e.g. a daily build) according to a ...

MSBuild by Example

February 5, 2008 Feb 5, 2008 02/5/08
Buck Hodges
Sayed Ibrahim Hashimi's book, Deploying .NET Applications, contains a chapter on MSBuild.  While I knew about the chapter in the book, I didn't realize that the chapter on MSBuild was available online until Eugene Zakhareyev mentioned it. If you are looking for a good way to get started with MSBuild, MSBuild: By Example is a good place ...