Buck Hodges

Azure DevOps (formerly VSTS and Team Foundation Server)

MSBuild - Buck Hodges

MSBuild Sidekick V2 beta

December 12, 2007 Dec 12, 2007 12/12/07
Buck Hodges
Eugene Zakhareyev has released a beta of the second version of MSBuild Sidekick.  This version adds some unique features, including visualizing the build targets.  If you've ever had to pick up someone else's msbuild project files, you'll really appreciate this feature. Here's a screenshot of the target visualization from ...

How would you prioritize features for MSBuild?

November 18, 2007 Nov 18, 2007 11/18/07
Buck Hodges
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 ...

New home for the AssemblyInfo task

July 3, 2007 Jul 3, 2007 07/3/07
Buck Hodges
The AssemblyInfo task has a new home, because the CodeGallery portion of GoDotNet is being phased out.  You can now find it here in the GotDotNet User Samples.The AssemblyInfo task is useful for updating assembly version numbers as part of your build.  Aaron Hallberg explains how to use it with Team Build in his post, Team Build...

How to deal with the Y2K7 problem — file versions and AssemblyInfoTask

January 6, 2007 Jan 6, 2007 01/6/07
Buck Hodges
If you use the AssemblyInfoTask to stamp the version numbers for your assemblies that you build with MSBuild as part of your Team Build process, you may run into the "Y2K7" problem.  The version number is stored as a 16-bit (yes, 16 not 32) unsigned integer.  With the format YMMDD, January 1, 2007 becomes 70101, which is 70,101 and ...

Building software against different versions of .NET with MSBuild in Orcas

November 15, 2006 Nov 15, 2006 11/15/06
Buck Hodges
Faisal Mohamood, a program manager on the MSBuild team, has written a pair of posts about the "multi-targeting" feature in the Orcas version of MSBuild.  Multi-targeting allows you to build your code against the .NET 2.0, 3.0, or 3.5 frameworks, according to your requirements.  This is great because it allows folks to have some ...

MSBuild wiki

August 11, 2006 Aug 11, 2006 08/11/06
Buck Hodges
In addition to the MSBuild documentation on MSDN and the MSBuild team blog, there is an MSBuild wiki on Channel9.  I had seen it before, but forgotten about it until I saw it mentioned in one of Chris Sells' old blog posts (My First MsBuild Task).Here's the current table of contents for the wiki. Frequently Asked Questions General...