What are the advantage of using MSBuild

Question

HI All

My Manager forcing me to use MS Build in my application.I developed my application in asp.net MVC. Please help me to remove some bad question in my mind

1. what are the advantage of MS Build?

2. Is there any other Build which is batter then MS Build?

3. What are the drawbacks on simple build of project?

Thanks in Advance

Answer 1

Advantages with MSBuild:

1. Available as it is installed as part of .NET
2. It shares the build system with Visual Studio

Drawback: Well, the XML syntax may not be intuitive.

Answer 2

MSBuild is great. It is similar in concept to NAnt, but slightly different with some of its tasks or implementations.

Once you get used to it, you will be cranking out the build files. Take a look at a csproj file, it is very similar to a MSBuild file (it uses a lot of the same structure but it technically isn't a MSBuild file). Building custom tasks for it is very simple, there are plenty of guides on teh interweb which walk you through how to do it.

If you are looking for alternatives, then i would go to NAnt. It is free, and has a huge amount of community support and extra tasks available. I haven't used it for a few years though, so i can't comment on its exact state at the moment.

There are no real drawbacks to using MSBuild, unless you count the amount of time it will take to get up to speed with it, and the amount of time you have to spend researching it.

From your questions it sounds like you don't really have much of a build process in place - take the time to do it, once you have you will wonder why you didn't do it sooner.