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I have a project where there are files in a particular non-standard textual format. When these files are touched/modified, I want to run a certain custom compiler on them to generate XML, which is part of the output of the whole solution.

I'm considering creating a MSBuild task to do this. It will take as input the non-stadard file names and output the requisite XML files. The task will then be used in the other projects in the solution.

I want new developers on this project to have minimal setup. That means, I want to be able to take a clean copy of my solution directly from source control and have the build first build the custom task, then apply it as necessary to the other projects in the class.

I'm concerned that the build output of the project that builds the custom task needs to copy its output assembly to some known location so that the other projects can refer to it. What is the proper way of going about doing this?

John Källén
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  • Don't over-engineer that. Check-in the pre-built MyCustomTask.dll into source control, then refer to it from your projects like this: `` – seva titov May 07 '15 at 20:21
  • As S.T. says: put the assembly in a 'known' location and reference it from there. If you really want you don't have to put the pre-built task dll into source control but you can build it on the fly from source using the `Csc` task. – stijn May 09 '15 at 08:00

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You're about to walk into a mess here, because Visual Studio is going to lock the custom task Assembly when it's first used, thereby causing any further builds in Visual Studio (i.e. Build > Solution) to fail.

As @stijn commented, you should override the Build target and use another method of building the assembly with the custom task, e.g. using the Csc task or spawning another MSBuild.exe process (see answer to linked question).

The way I decided to go though was to create a separate solution, e.g. "Build Tools", containing the custom task assembly (among other tools), and required that it be built before anything else. I personally find the notion of checking-in prebuilt binaries of this source very unpalatable. If developers didn't want to build the Build Tools solution, they would copy the output from some nightly build.

Unfortunately there isn't an easy way of getting around "hardcoding" a known (relative) location. Using $(SolutionDir) usually works - just not if you try to run MSBuild on the project directly, instead of the solution (VS is a bit more intelligent when you open a project by itself).

Community
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makhdumi
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