Safe to use msbuild from VS 2010 on VS 2008 projects / .Net 3.5

Question

I use Teamcity on Windows 2003/IIS 6 for my continous integration environment. I use the msbuild runner. Whilst I know there are a number of tasks and way to handle config replacement and transformation between environments I'm particularly interested in this one provided by Microsoft based XSLT principles which looks like it refers to msbuild in .Net 4.0 SDK:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd465326%28VS.100%29.aspx

Is it possible (or risky) to take the MSBUILD executable and dependencies and copy them up to the server and use that MSBUILD to handle the compilation, I will be targetting .Net 3.5 so presumably the backward support is not the votaile part?

Can I just get the beta msbuild without downloading VS2010?

Does the MSBUILD from VS 2010 require .Net 4.0 sdk if I explicitly specifying paramters to target .Net 3.5?

Answer 1

I would suspect that it's dependency would be the .net 4.0 fmk installed on the build server.

Answer 2

These are not a part of MSBuild itself. I think these are more associated with MSDeploy which is integrated into VS 2010 and IIS 7. There are a bunch of web related MSBuild .targets files, which also have some MSBuild tasks. As mentioned in a previous comment, in order to use these tasks you will need to have .NET 4.0 installed on the build server but I don't see why you would need to have your applications to target .NET 4.0. I was thinking of using those tasks for web transformations myself for non-.NET 4.0 apps, but haven't gotten there yet.