Buck Hodges

Azure DevOps (formerly VSTS and Team Foundation Server)

A tool to find duplicate copies in a build

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 ...