"Aliasing" tasks in msbuild for intellisense

Question

i'm really hoping i just don't know how to do this, and that 'this' is doable... but one of my biggest complaints to date with msbuild is that they 'break' schema by using dots in the names of the tags.

example:

I want to bake intellisense into my build using vs 2005 but I can't because the namespace qualified task names are invalid per xsd and thus when I open my build project ALL my intellisense is gone (cause the schema is invalid).

try it. add something like:

    element name="Microsoft.Sdc.Tasks.ActiveDirectory.Group.AddUser" 

to your Microsoft.Build.Commontypes.xsd and you'll lose all your intellisense.

I'm looking for a way to 'alias' the class with the taskname I want... It doesn't appear from my reading that I can do this, but maybe somebody out there knows how?

Effectively I would like to do:

Any thoughts?

Can I write my own "UsingTask" that just wraps these shennanigans and let's me do what I want?

I'm open to thoughts... :)

Thanks to all!

Answer 1

Sounds like you should be using the right tool for the right job. Have you looked into NANT at all?

-mwf

Answer 2

it stripped out my text after "Effectively I would like to do:" so i'm posting it here...

  UsingTask assemblyname="my.dll" TaskName="This.Is.My.Task" Alias="This-Is-My-Task"