Dan Moseley

In Visual Studio 2003 and earlier, the build process for Visual Basic and C# projects was hard-coded, and built into Visual Studio itself. The only build scripting tool that Microsoft offered was nmake, and a companion tool called build.exe that provided some support for concurrent builds. Visual Studio users whose build systems were based on makefiles had to maintain project files in parallel. For Visual Studio 2005, we thought it would be great if it was possible to completely customize the build process, and to build Visual Studio projects on machines that didn't even have Visual Studio installed, exactly the same as they built inside Visual Studio. We also wanted to be able to plug in reuseable build loggers and build steps. MSBuild shipped in .NET Framework 2.0, and Visual Studio 2005 was based on it. To date we've only released build processes for Visual Basic ... (more)