Inside the Microsoft® Build Engine: Using MSBuild and Team Foundation Build: Using MSBuild and Team Foundation Build

By Sayed Ibrahim Hashimi and William Bartholomew

Book Overview

As software complexity increases, proper build practices become ever more important. This essential reference drills inside MSBuild--and shows how to maximize your control over the build and deployment process. Learn how to customize and extend build processes with MSBuild--and scale them to the team, product, or enterprise level with Team Foundation Build. Discover how to: Create and modify MSBuild files--outside the Visual Studio IDE Use XML-based syntax to declare dynamic properties and items Apply built-in tasks or write your own Customize the build process--adding code generation, unit testing, or code analysis Use batching and incremental builds to reduce build times Invoke external tools in scripts and create reusable files Start and stop services Set assembly versions and extend the clean process Configure, customize, and extend Team Build--and automate build from end to end This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0735626286
• ISBN13: 9780735626287
• Release Date: January 2009
• Publisher: Microsoft Press
• Length: 406 Pages
• Weight: 1.95 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.4" x 7.2" x 8.9"

Customer Reviews

The missing MSBuild manual

I'm a developer on MSBuild; Sayed wrote this book with our encouragement, and we reviewed it for accuracy and completeness, so I can recommend it. The documentation for MSBuild in 2.0 and 3.5 was not great; I consider this something like the missing manual. Unfortunately there aren't many other MSBuild books; fortunately Sayed did a good job on this one. We're fixing a lot of what's "missing" in MSBuild in the upcoming version...

Best book on the subject, hands down.

This book is outstanding. A literal step-by-step walk through of MSBuild and Team Build. I have been working with these products for almost a year and learned them on my own, via various websites, blogs, msdn walk-throughs, etc. There are a myriad of sources with bits and pieces of the information you need, and I feel this book pulls them all together in one very well written book. This is the best source to get going from...

A "must have" for any budding build master.

I've been working with MSBuild now for about a year and have learnt it solely from other people feeding me strips of information here and there. Recently I have been working on an enterprise project that requires the utmost attention concerning automated builds. I searched for anything on MSBuild and came across this gem. Even though I have decent experience in MSBuild I read this book from front to back twice over and was...

Highly Impressed

This is a well written book on the MSBuild system. I was working on an open source project that will generate the MSBuild scripts and wanted to understand it well enough to take maximum advantage of it. This book is all that I was waiting for, it is worth the price. The explanations are simply and very clear - easy to understand language. There are few mistakes, but you can easily tell. After reading the Quick Start (Chapter...