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MSBuild Property Functions (2)

May 5, 2010 May 5, 2010 05/5/10
Visual Studio Blog
Some more information about this 4.0 feature. (I've also updated the first post with this, so everything's in one place for your reference.)Built-in MSBuild functionsThe full list of built-in [MSBuild] functions, like the one above, are in the MSDN topic here. They include arithmetic (useful, for example, for modifying version numbers), ...

MSBuild Property Functions

April 2, 2010 Apr 2, 2010 04/2/10
Visual Studio Blog
Have you ever wanted to do something simple in a build, like get a substring of a property value, and found that MSBuild didn't have syntax for it? You then had to write a task for it, which was tiresome to do for such a simple operation. What's more, if you wanted to do this during evaluation – outside of a target – you couldn't run a ...

Why does Visual Studio 2010 convert my projects?

March 14, 2010 Mar 14, 2010 03/14/10
Visual Studio Blog
(image) Hi, I am Richa Prasad and I am the Program Manager for the Project System team. This means that I work on many features for managing projects and solutions. One such feature is the conversion process. We have recently received many requests for making the conversion process optional; i.e. supporting the ability to open old Visual ...

Tuning C++ build parallelism in VS2010

March 7, 2010 Mar 7, 2010 03/7/10
Visual Studio Blog
A great way to get fast builds on a multiprocessor computer is to take advantage of as much parallelism in your build as possible. If you have C++ projects, there’s two different kinds of parallelism you can configure. What are the dials I can set? Project-level parallel build, which is controlled by MSBuild, is set at the solution level in...

MSBuild 4 Detailed Build Summary

March 5, 2010 Mar 5, 2010 03/5/10
Visual Studio Blog
Introduction When we were developing the current version of MSBuild, we spent a lot of time analyzing builds to determine where our performance issues lay. The standard logging, even on diagnostic verbosity and with the performance summary enabled (/clp:PerformanceSummary=true on the MSBuild command line) doesn’t give us the kind of ...

How to: Retarget a project using DTE

February 25, 2010 Feb 25, 2010 02/25/10
Visual Studio Blog
The upcoming .NET Framework 4 and Visual Studio 2010 (now in RC) has a lot of exciting new features. From BigInt and parallel libraries, to code contracts, CLR side by side, a new project system for C++ and multi-targeting. Just to name a few. There is much more. No matter what features you are the most interested in, you can start exploring...

Getting Started with MSBuild

February 25, 2010 Feb 25, 2010 02/25/10
Visual Studio Blog
I have had several customers asking me about MSBuild and how to get started learning the language and using it. A little over a year and a half ago, I joined the MSBuild team. When I got here, I did not even know what MSBuild was, and I have been a Visual Studio user for many years. This article is to help you understand what MSBuild is, how ...

If your build fails with “MSB6002: The command-line for the “ResGen” task is too long”

February 15, 2010 Feb 15, 2010 02/15/10
Visual Studio Blog
UPDATE: This issue is fixed in .NET 4.5. As always, feedback is welcome! Please leave your comments in this blog post and report any bugs on Microsoft Connect.   If you have the RC build of VS2010, you are targeting the 3.5, 3.0, or 2.0 Framework, you have a VB or C# project which has a lot of references, and you also have a lot of .resx ...

MSBuild Interview on CodeCast

January 22, 2010 Jan 22, 2010 01/22/10
Visual Studio Blog
I had the distinct pleasure to meet up with Ken Levy and talk about MSBuild. Ken is responsible for the CodeCast interviews at code magazine.The interview consists of an in-depth technical and scenario discussion on how and why to use MSBuild, both in Visual Studio 2008 and Visual Studio 2010.  We also discussed new ...