Best practice to integrate custom build tasks in Visual Studio 2008 Project/Solution

Question

To increase the automated part of our build/release process, I would like to integrate some custom tasks in our visual studio projects. What's the best way to organize such solutions? The main problem is: If I add the project implementing the tasks to the solution, the tasks are cached by the visual studio instance. So a rebuild does not work, because the output assemblies of the task project cannot be overwritten.

I can put the task in a separate solution. Seems to be the best (only?) option, but I don't like to maintain two solutions. This makes continous integration more complicated.

Any hints? How do you manage solutions having project specific custom build tasks?

Answer 1

If the custom build tasks refer to some documents included in the solution, then you can make a custom build rules document, refer it in your solution and specify the custom build name for each document in the properties (this will spare you on writing command, dependencies and everything for each document, if the rule is specified correctly using the macros like $(InputPath), etc.)

If the custom build tasks refer to some operations that are not related to documents in solution, you can have them specified as commands in the post build event of the project in the solution that needs it. Another alternative can be to add a new, dummy project in the solution that will have only this post build event, dependent on all the other projects (so the post build tasks will be called only after all the other projects were built).