Is there a User Interface for editing MSBuild Projects?

Question

I work in a dev environment where we heavily use MSBuild - I find myself constantly having to edit my build csproj xml by hand. I hate this - there seems like there should be a nice UI for editing these files and performing common tasks. I would of imagined that a tab in Project Properties Pages in Visual Studio would have given me something but alas. Ideally I would be able to:

1. Do everything I can in Xml including being able to interact with any custom steps I created
2. See what the MSBuild variables evaluated to
3. See where the variables are defined so that I could quickly navigate to them

Answer 1

Attrice Microsoft Build Sidekick is the best I know.

Actually, I'm not quite sure if there are any other graphical tool for MSBuild.

Answer 2

You can check out Attrice Corporations Microsoft Build Sidekick v2.3. Here's the link: http://www.attrice.info/msbuild/

Version 1 is also available as freeware. Here's the link: http://www.attrice.info/msbuild/version1.htm

Answer 3

Since I don't have funds for this MsBuild sidekick, I use Msbuild Template in visual studio and MsBuild Profiler.

I have all my tasks split out in to multiple files and when I need to test / debug I run the single task from the command line.