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

Introduction

Build has historically been kind of like a black art, in the sense that there are just a few people who know and understand build, and are passionate about it. But in today’s evolving environment that is changing. Now more and more people are becoming interested in build, and making it a part of their routine development activities. Today’s applications are different from those that we were building five to ten years ago. Along with that the process by which we write software is different as well. Nowadays it is not uncommon for a project to have sophisticated build processes which include such things as code generation, code analysis, unit testing, automated deployment, etc. To deal with these changes developers are no longer shielded ...