MSBUILD Configuration: Copy output to staging area

Question

Ok, I am not the best at MSBUILD. Actually, I don't know anything. I need some help configuring my solution file to tell MSbuild to copy the compiled output into a staging area. The solution has about 35 projects. All I need is around 5 of them the to be copied to the staging folder in release mode. Please assume I know nothing...

Thanks

Answer 1

You could create a Target that looks like this:

  <Target Name="CopyFiles" DependsOnTargets="YourBuildTargets">
    <CreateItem Include="YourSolutionPath\bin\$(Configuration)\*.*">
      <Output ItemName="YourProjectOutputFiles" TaskParameter="Include"></Output>
    </CreateItem>

    <Copy SourceFiles="@(YourProjectOutputFiles)" DestinationFolder="$(DestinationFolder)"></Copy>
  </Target>

This will create a target called CopyFiles which depends on the completion of YourBuildTargets (You can put multiple dependencies in there, separated with semi colons). It describes an Item which includes all of the files (*.*) in the project directory. Then it runs the Copy command, and copies the files described by the item to the destination folder. If you have lots of projects all being build by 1 MSBuild script, you would have a CreateItem node for each project to index the files, and a corresponding Copy node to perform the copy.

Or if you just want to do this for each project separately, just put this block inside each .csproj file.

Now just include the CopyFiles target in the list of targets that gets build by your script.