Inside The Microsoft Build Engine

As software complexity increases, proper build practices become ever more important. This essential reference—fully updated for Visual Studio 2010—drills inside MSBuild and shows you 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.

Get the supplement that helps you drill even further into MSBuild—and maximize your control over the software build and deployment process. Designed as a companion to the popular book Inside the Microsoft Build Engine: Using MSBuild and Team Foundation Build, Second Edition, this supplement extends your knowledge by covering what’s new in Visual Studio 2012 for MSBuild and Team Foundation Build. You’ll also gain a fresh cookbook of examples to help you get productive with UI changes, batching, Team Foundation Server, offline apps, database publishing, and other essential topics. Extends your knowledge of MSBuild with all-new coverage of Visual Studio 2012 Shares additional hands-on insights and guidance from two expert authors Provides a cookbook of examples to study and reuse

Presents a guide to the software build and deployment process using MSBuild.

A practical guide to effectively using, customizing, and extending the build engine. 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

MSBuild is more than just a list of source files; it is a declarative programming language, and with the new features in the .Net 4.0 engine, a rather expressive language to boot. This book explores the Microsoft Build Engine used by C#, VB.Net, F# and C++ projects-the 4.0 version shipped with Visual Studio 2010-in depth and in a very practical way, full of examples not covered in the reference material (or in the other book on MSBuild). Inside you'll find: How to unify all your projects How to add help to your build How to simulate loops and data joins How to use inline C# code in project files How to enhance logging ...and over 90 additional tips and tricks, and including some extensive walkthroughs of more advanced topics, like dealing with huge projects and rolling your own tool integrations right in the IDE. You can further explore the content with code samples on the Web. So if you've ever found yourself wondering how to get MSBuild to... Perform some simple arithmetic, or a string replacement (see trick #9) Find a subset of files using a complex expression (see trick #11) Specify the folder where MSBuild.exe resides (see trick #6) Fail the build when your custom task shows an error but the build still succeeds (see trick #2) Get you a list of all the referenced assemblies in your project (see trick #72) Get Visual Studio to stop ignoring your customizations (see trick #82) Search for your customizations, without having to hardcode paths (see trick #16) Allow almost any property to be tweaked (see trick #45) Do something that seems too complex for AfterBuild (see trick #23) Extract the branch name from a path (see trick #99) And don't be put off if you're brand new to MSBuild. If you've ever so much as peeked at the XML in a C# project file, you'll be well served by this book. You'll start from first principals and the most basic mechanisms of MSBuild and the structure of an MSBuild file will be explained. Each trick is small and digestible and presented in a way that you can try out new techniques with just a few lines of MSBuild in a text file. Most of the tricks are things you can copy directly into your own build files and use that day. While many of the tricks stand on their own, the more complex ones are broken down and presented in sequences that progressively build on one another. You won't need any other book on MSBuild! But if you happen to have the other one, MSBuild Trickery will take you far beyond a reference book, providing practical guidance and preparing you for all of those truly unique gotchas that appear when the build runs. With a foreword by Dan Moseley, Microsoft Senior Development Lead for Visual Studio Project & Build.

Proven author provides expert analysis on key new features Visual Studio 2005 release provides an ample catalyst for sales of this book Our .NET 2.0 series has proven to be a very successful book line; this is a member of such

A comprehensive guide to using Microsoft Team Foundation Server 2012 Team Foundation Server has become the leading Microsoft productivity tool for software management, and this book covers what developers need to know to use it effectively. Fully revised for the new features of TFS 2012, it provides developers and software project managers with step-by-step instructions and even assists those who are studying for the TFS 2012 certification exam. You'll find a broad overview of TFS, thorough coverage of core functions, a look at extensibility options, and more, written by Microsoft insiders and MVPs. An update of the leading Wrox book on Team Foundation Server, written by an expert team of Microsoft insiders and MVPs Provides a broad overview of Team Foundation Server for developers, software project managers, testers, business analysts, and others wanting to learn how to use TFS Offers administrators the necessary tools to efficiently monitor and manage the TFS environment Covers core TFS functions including project management, work item tracking, version control, test case management, build automation, reporting, and how to write extensions for TFS 2012 Professional Team Foundation Server 2012 builds on the proven Wrox Professional formula to give you a solid background in this software management tool.