Visual Studio Hacks

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Chapter 4, Customizing Visual Studio

#34 Customize Your Project Build Process

HACK

HACK

#34

Customize Your Project Build Process Hack #34

Find out how to automate tasks that occur prior to, during, or after a build.

While the Visual Studio build process is familiar for all .NET developers, not

everyone realizes the build customization capabilities that can be accom-

plished with just a little work. You can easily put together tasks that occur

before, after, and even during a build.

With the release of Visual Studio 2005 (Whidbey), a new

build tool—called MSBuild—will be used within the Visual

Studio environment. This tool will provide many build pro-

cess workflows and will be similar to NAnt in capability.

Pre- and Post-Build Event Commands

In nonweb projects, you can create pre- and post-build event commands. As

their names suggest, these are commands that you can customize to run just

prior to or after a build. You can even control whether the post-build event

executes at all depending on the outcome of the build. You can find these

settings on the project properties under the Build Events tab (see

Figure 4-26).

Just type in the command you want to occur for each event type. When you

select the text box to enter the command, you can click on the button on the

righthand side of the text box to expand the command window and gain

access to the list of macros or variables available. These variables ...