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

Task Input/Output

When you create custom MSBuild tasks they will most likely need to accept some input and/or provide some output values. Inside your task these are implemented with normal .NET properties that may be decorated with attributes. Don’t confuse these with MSBuild properties. We will first examine a very simple example and then move on to discuss more realistic tasks. Building on the HelloWorld2 task, I’ve created a new task, HelloWorld3, which accepts two input parameters. Those input parameters are FirstName and LastName. The definition of the HelloWorld3 task is shown as follows.

public class HelloWorld3 : Task { [Required] public string FirstName { get; set; } public string LastName { get; set; } public override bool Execute() { ...