Stand-alone build system for Visual Studio projects

Question

We use Make to compile our product, which includes, C, C++, Java and a bunch of other bits and pieces. As much as possible we have all tools required to compile the whole thing checked into source control, to eliminate local dependencies and to ensure consistency across dev machines.

Recently we've added some components written in C# using Visual Studio and would like to take a similar approach with VS solutions. Shelling out to devenv isn't a good option. Calling csc.exe directly (as I've done before using Nant) would require keeping track of file dependencies in the build script, which I'd rather just let the VS solution do.

Msbuild seems like a good bet, though it's default location in %windir%\Microsoft.NET\Framework[version]\ makes me worried about variability between machines, both with the [version] in the path and the fact that you'll see both "Framework" and "Framework64" dirs. I wouldn't mind having a requirement that all devs have whatever .NET framework version installed, but I do worry that your v3.5 might not be the same as mine.

Does anyone have a solution to this that they like? Tried anything that you really didn't like?

thanks, Eric

Answer 1

MSBuild is the lowest-friction option for sure. Different fx versions aren't that big a deal at build-time- if you're using something important from a fx version higher than what's installed, it won't build. The last place I was at, we built a huge multi-environment build system with NAnt as the base, and it hooked out to MSBuild with NAnt's MSBuild tasks. MSBuild is fine on its own if you're just doing MS stuff, but we had a bunch of things that MSBuild didn't natively support, hence the NAnt wrapper.

Answer 2

Msbuild is the right tool for this job. Just match your framework version to the version of the framework bundled with the Visual Studio you're using. 32-bit versus 64-bit shouldn't matter, I don't think -- I'm pretty sure both the 32-bit and 64-bit editions of Csc.exe can cross-compile to the other platform. The Msbuild project file (.proj XML file) should contain everything Msbuild needs to build your app.

Answer 3

Agree with everyone else. To make it easy, just make vsvars.bat (the batch file that a Visual Studio Command prompt) part of your build script, then msbuild will just work.

Answer 4

We use Nant to drive msbuild. If you're worried about different versions of the framework, particularly service packs, use FxCop to check that you're not letting unexpected dependencies creep in. Details are in this answer.