Checkout from TFS with MSBuild

Question

What's the easiest way to checkout a file from our TFS with MSBUILD.

From what I can see it's to shell out to TF.EXE and manually call the checkout command. Is there really no built in command?!

Answer 1

There really is no built in command. Even worse, the tf checkout command only accepts a single filespec.

The recently released MSBuildExtensionPack has some msbuild commands for TFS, but no perf gain there. Under the hood, they shell out to tf.exe

Answer 2

the 'itemspec' can be a list of space-delimited items and can use wildcards.