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

Chapter 7. External Tools

MSBuild has been around since Visual Studio 2005 (.NET 2.0), so it is still a somewhat new technology. Sometimes, when there’s no specific MSBuild task that provides the functionality you need, you’ll need to use one of the many existing tools that can and should be used to assist in build and deployments. Some of the most commonly used tools include FxCop, StyleCop, NUnit, and so on. In this chapter I will describe how external tools can be effectively consumed by MSBuild. We’ll examine a few commonly used tools and discuss how to integrate them into your build process. We’ll first describe how these can simply be invoked in build scripts and then describe a way to create reusable targets files for tools. Also, we will ...