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

Supported Task Input and Output Types

Task inputs and outputs are the only means by which a project file can communicate with a task. This is by design, so that it is easy to see what information is passed into and out of the task by reading the project file. When you create values that can be passed into and out of tasks, there are a variety of types that are supported. Since XML is the representation that all MSBuild scripts are stored in, all values must be able to be converted to and from a string. As mentioned in Chapter 2,there are fundamentally two types of values that are supported by MSBuild: scalar values and vector values. For vector values an array of acceptable scalar types is allowed. Table 4-4 summarizes what types are supported ...