Import .targets file from command line in msbuild

Question

I currently have multiple projects being build using msbuild. I have a small customisation to the build that is handled by a .targets file. One solution is to add the snippet

<Import Project="MyTargets.targets"/>

to each project file. However, ideally I would like to not touch the project files, and be able to pass this information as a parameter to msbuild. That way I could easily control whether I run this customisation from the command line, and I don't have to touch the existing project files.

Is this possible?

Answer 1

You can do that easily with MSBuild 4.0 (check your version by top-level attribute ToolsVersion="4.0"):

There are multiple properties you can use to import your targets before and after Common.targets and or CSharp.targets loaded.

Simplest way is to use 2 sets of self explaining properties. First set is: $(CustomBeforeMicrosoftCommonTargets) $(CustomAfterMicrosoftCommonTargets)

and second one:

$(CustomBeforeMicrosoftCSharpTargets)
$(CustomAfterMicrosoftCSharpTargets)

Property names are pretty self-explained.

Just pass full file name to any of this properties via msbuild.exe e.g.

msbuild.exe /p:CustomBeforeMicrosoftCSharpTargets=c:\mytargets\custom.targets

You can use other "ImportByWildcard(Before|After)...." properties if you need to import multiple files. But in that case you need to pass more parameters to command-line.