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

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 it 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 5 to 10 years ago. Along with that, the process that we use to write software is different as well. Nowadays, it is not uncommon for a project to have sophisticated build processes that include such things as code generation, code analysis, unit testing, automated deployment, and so on. To deal with these changes, developers are no longer ...