Windows Developer Power Tools

12.4 Extending MSBuild Capabilities with MSBuild Community Tasks

MSBuild is a great addition to the build platform for Visual Studio. The MSBuild Community Tasks Project provides custom MSBuild tasks that extend the basic functionality provided in the MSBuild distribution, to help you deal with typical scenarios encountered when constructing automated builds for .NET 2.0 projects and solutions.

The MSBuild Community Tasks Project contains over 50 tasks that integrate with MSBuild. The tasks allow for the execution of common build activities, including the controlling of application pools, web directories, Windows services, common open source applications, versioning, and popular version-control systems.

Specific tasks in the project include:

• FxCop to run the FxCop static analysis tool on your assemblies

• NDoc to create documentation with the NDoc tool

• NUnit to run your NUnit unit tests

• Mail to send email

• XMLRead and XMLWrite to use XPath for interacting with XML documents

MSBuild Community Tasks Project at a Glance
Tool	MSBuild Community Tasks Project
Version covered	1.1.0.145
Home page	http://msbuildtasks.tigris.org
Power Tools page	http://www.windevpowertools.com/tools/52
Summary	A collection of community-written tasks that add functionality to MSBuild, including the ability to call FxCop, NDoc, NUnit, and much more
License type	BSD
Online resources	Forums, mailing lists, issue tracker
Supported Frameworks ...