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

Appendix A. New Features in MSBuild 3.5

MSBuild 3.5 shipped with a number of improvements from the previous version, MSBuild 2.0. Some of these changes improve performance and others will change how you create project files. We will discuss those changes in this appendix.

Properties and Items Declared Inside Targets

With MSBuild 2.0 you would declare static properties and items using the PropertyGroup and ItemGroup elements outside of tasks. When you needed to create dynamic properties or items, those defined inside targets, you could not use the same elements. Instead you had to use the CreateProperty and CreateItem tasks, which use a confusing syntax. Now you are able to create dynamic properties and items just as you would static ones. I recommend ...