I am not sure why but for some reason I always manage to post these messages at the last minute, sorry for that. I will be speaking at the Tampa Code Camp on Saturday December 6. We will cover various features of MSBuild. If you are in the area, and interested in MSBuild, please come check out my presentation.

Sayed Ibrahim Hashimi

Out of the box Team Build does not support Delta Builds. Thomas Janssen has a detailed post Realizing Delta Builds with VSTS Team Build for Delta Deployments which describes how this can be achieved. I have not had the opportunity to try this myself, but the blog post looks very through and informative. You can also download his DeltaBuild.targets file from his blog. I have the following comments relating to this; perhaps he will upgrade this file to reflect these comments.

This guidance is appropriate for target files which are designed to be consumed by others.

Don't override targets like AfterCompileSolution

Don't override targets like AfterCompileSolution. Instead extend the CompileSolutionDependsOn property in the manner:

<PropertyGroup>

<CompileSolutionDependsOn>

$(CompileSolutionDependsOn);

DeltaAfterCompileSolution

CompileSolutionDependsOn>

PropertyGroup>

This is because some consumers of this file may have already defined the AfterCompileSolution target. In which case one of them will be overridden.

Notice that I named the new target DeltaAfterCompileSolution. It is a best practice to prefix your targets with a value that should be unique. This will minimize the chances of your targets colliding with those defined by others. For example this could have been named MyAfterCompileSolution, but I bet there are a bunch of these already defined.

DependsOnTargets should always be taken from a property

You should define the DependsOnTargets value inside of a property, just like the MSFT targets files do. For example your DeltaAfterCompileSolution (after being renamed) would look like this:

<PropertyGroup>

<DeltaAfterCompileSolution>

$(DeltaAfterCompileSolution);

SafeCleanBuildResult;

GetLatestVersion;

CollectIncrementalBuildResult;

CreateDeltaBuildResult

DeltaAfterCompileSolution>

PropertyGroup>

<Target Name="DeltaAfterCompileSolution"

DependsOnTargets="$(DeltaAfterCompileSolution)">

Target>

This is because you want users to be able to extend this process similar to how users extend the built-in build process. Without this they may need to modify your file, which is ill-advised because you may make a new release at some point.
Also notice the usage of the $(DeltaAfterCompileSolution) in the declaration of the DeltaAfterCompileSolution property. This is to
preserve any previous values that the user may have defined.

On a side note, if you are looking for more detailed information regarding Team Build, there will be three chapters of my new book Inside the Microsoft® Build Engine: Mastering MSBuild and Team Build which will be published in January 2009. Sample chapters will be available at that link shortly.

Thanks,

Sayed Ibrahim Hashimi

I will be speaking at the Tallahassee Code Camp on Saturday 11, 2008. I will be presenting MSBuild there. I think I should have posted this blog earlier but I've been too busy writing my new book!

Sayed Ibrahim Hashimi

I was looking at the documentation for the Exec task (yes I'm writing a new MSBuild book!) and discovered that it is lacking. So I decided to post the complete list of properties here. So here it is for those of you using it.

* Denotes new properties in MSBuild 3.5

There is a slightly new behavior in this version of the task relating to detecting errors & warnings from the output of the command. Take a look at the forum entry Exec task and "error :" in output.

More to come on the new book later keep an eye here soon. If you have ideas about specific examples that should be demonstrated let me know, for example; how to zip a set of file, how to ftp files to a server, your example here, etc.

Sayed Ibrahim Hashimi

I looked around for an extension method that would just randomize a list. I found a couple but they either didn't seem to work right or the modified the collection itself instead of creating a new collection and returning that. So I created one, it is pretty simple anywayz. The definition for it is shown below.

public static class IListExtensions
{
    public static IList Randomize(this IList input)
    {
        if (input == null)
        { throw new ArgumentException("input"); }

        var test = (from p in input
                    select new { Id = rand.Next(), ListObject = p }).OrderBy(t => t.Id);

        IList randomList = new List();
        foreach (var item in test)
        {
            randomList.Add(item.ListObject);
        }

        return randomList;
    }

    static Random rand = new Random();
}

From here we use this method just like any other IList method, an example is shown below.

public void SampleRandomize()
{
    int numElemnets = 10;
    IList numList = new List();
    for (int i = 0; i < numElemnets; i++)
    {
        numList.Add(i);
    }

    IList radnomList = numList.Randomize();

    for (int i = 0; i < randomList.Count; i++)
    {
        System.Diagnostics.Debug.WriteLine(string.Format("i: {0}", randomList[i]));
    }
}

I think it's pretty cool how you can create methods that can be soo easily used thanks to extension methods.

Sayed Ibrahim Hashimi