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

Debugging Tasks

When you write custom MSBuild tasks you are writing managed code, and hooking into an existing process, the MSBuild engine. Even though MSBuild tasks are very easy to write, you will inevitably run into times when they do not behave as you expect. This will be the case especially when you are writing complex tasks. When this time arrives you will need to debug your tasks, which we discuss in this section.

When you need to debug your custom MSBuild tasks, you will find that there are primarily three ways to debug these tasks. Ultimately the goal when debugging tasks is to have all the tools available when one is debugging .NET applications. We should be able to use Visual Studio to debug custom tasks. Following are three ways that ...