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MSBuild: What is it, and when do I need it?
I`ve never used MSBuild and have no idea what is the purpose of MSBuild. It would be nice if anyone describe briefly that in what kind of situation people use MSBuild.
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The Microsoft Build Engine is a platform for building applications. This engine, which is also known as MSBuild, provides an XML schema for a project file that controls how the build platform processes and builds software. Visual Studio uses MSBuild, but MSBuild doesn't depend on Visual Studio.
Basically devenv (Visual Studio) wraps MSBuild and add lots of Visual Studio specific properties. To use devenv you need Visual Studio installed on your computer. To use MSBuild you only need to have the . NET framework.
To build a specific target of a specific project in a solution. At the command line, type MSBuild.exe <SolutionName>. sln , where <SolutionName> corresponds to the file name of the solution that contains the target that you want to execute.
A target element can have both Inputs and Outputs attributes, indicating what items the target expects as input, and what items it produces as output. If all output items are up-to-date, MSBuild skips the target, which significantly improves the build speed. This is called an incremental build of the target.
Basically MsBuild is for building your project/solution. You can use msbuild commandline prompt to build your project rather than right click and build. MsBuild is very useful when it comes to automated build servers where you build projects once somebody checkin any new code.
Another advantage of msbuild is, it's capable to build your project without having VS IDE. You don't need VS IDE to build your project in automated build servers.
Below are few sites that provide good information for you.
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/wea2sca5.aspx MSDN MSBuild Documentation
http://channel9.msdn.com/wiki/default.aspx/MSBuild.HomePage MSBuild Wikki
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/0k6kkbsd.aspx MSBuild Reference
http://blogs.msdn.com/msbuild/default.aspx MSBuild Team Blog
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