Inside the Microsoft Build Engine: Using MSBuild and Team Foundation Build (Developer Reference)

A couple of years ago, I upgraded a few custom build steps from the old VS format to the new one. This had to be one of the most frustrating experience I've ever went through as a programmer!!Learning how to use the old custom build steps had taken me a single evening, allowing me to create tons of custom properties with everything working flawlessly. The automatic conversion to the new format generated by VS was FAR from being perfect, which forced me to dig into these completely new files and language, which was MSBUILD. With virtually no MSDN documentation on it (even to this day!!), I literally spent months (evening project) trying to get things to work just how I wanted. In the end, I just had to settle for "good enough", as I was losing my sanity.I recently came across this book through some comments on Stackeoverflow. Wow! In a single day, I've learned more on the whole topic than I did in months of frustration using the meaningless one-liners on MSDN.I highly recommend this book. It does a great job a gradually introducing you to the various components of MSBUILD, always demonstrated with easy-to-understand exemples.Avoid the frustration... it's probably the most beneficial programing book one ever purchased.I had originally given this a 5 stars, before I was completely done with it. I had learned so much in do little time, that I was confident about giving it the 5 stars. However, I just reached part 2 of the Visual Studio 2010 section and it is noticeably less well written. Clearly, this was written by somebody else. It also starts off as if we didn't know how properties worked, at that point in the book! The vocabulary is also different, which complicates things. The author of the first half should review and edit these other sections and bring them up to par with the rest of the book.

First off, this is a fantastic book. I used the 1st edition with TFS 2008. This new edition includes great content for the new, completely revamped, build workflow process in TFS 2010.However, as a new Kindle user, when I went to purchase the second edition, I ended up with the wrong one. After returning it via the Amazon Kindle return process (which is pretty painless), I was able to get the correct version. I wish Amazon had a better way of classifying/naming their book versions. They should call the Kindle versions "Version 1" and Version 2" to coincide with the book versions. Instead, there is the regular Kindle version (which is the new one!) and the Kindle "November 11, 2009" edition. Hover your mouse cursor over the Kindle links to see which picture appears. If you want the newer edition, be sure to click on the Kindle link with a "2" appearing in the picture of the cover.As with any IT books for the Kindle, watch for missing content. I've been seeing this problem with a lot of IT books from Amazon. Maybe we need to create a web site called MissingKindleContent.com or a way (unknown to me!) to report Kindle errors to Amazon so they can fix it.So far, no problems with this book. Big thumbs up!

This book is an absolute must if you want to do anything useful in MSBuild. There is a baffling lack of MSBuild documentation on MSDN and there are not enough examples and tutorials in blogs to fill in MSDN's vast documentation gap. Buy this book if you need to learn the basics and inner workings of:+ How and when projects and imports are parsed and processed+ How and when properties and items are evaluated+ How target and task batching work+ How to chain targets together+ How to create incremental builds+ How to integrate other tools into MSBuild+ How to write your own custom tasks when MSBuild lacks the expressive power.This book leaves nothing unexplained. If you have any MSBuild questions at all, this book will answer them.

After reading the first couple of chapters of this book, I was astonished that nearly 40 years into the computer revolution such poorly-executed computer books were still being published.This is one of those books that assumes such a high level of existing knowledge on the part of the reader that you wonder why the intended reader would need the book in the first place. It's kind of like those O'Reilly "In A Nutshell" books, which are anything but. If you happen to like those books, maybe this one will work for you.And early on it detours into a pointless explanation of XML. If the reader has the level of MSBuild knowledge the rest of the book assumes, they already know how XML works.I bought this to help with issues creating SQL builds, but the joke was on me. Apparently, SQL doesn't even exist as far as this author is concerned. I can't find a single mention of it.From my perspective, this book is utterly useless.

This is a great reference to understanding MSbuild and the other Microsoft technology that depends on it. Even if you do not use TFS in your build cycle this is a must have book.

Just what I needed. Picked it up pretty quickly. Clearly written. Great book.

Good book but Amazon Kindle version is no good because it was missing the table of contents and is hard to navigate. Good book - badly presented.

Excellent resource. Better than online references.

Ich habe mir dieses Buch mitten in einer ziemlich schwierigen Umsetzung gekauft, und war mehr als positiv überrascht. Das Buch geht immer zweigeteilt an einen Themenbereich heran. Grundlagen und "Deep-Dive". Perfekt, denn so ist für jeden etwas dabei und sogar auf die Erstellung eigener Extensions wird eingegangen.Besonders gut hat mir gefallen, dass nicht nur bei MSBuild Schluss ist, sondern auch TFS Build mit seinen Besonderheiten behandelt wird.Unterm Strich: Absolute Kaufempfehlung für jeden, der mit Builds zu tun hat!

The books contents desperately need to be restructured and presented differently. It fails to cut it on multiple levels concerning managing build processes, probably because the focus is on MSBuild the tool API. The code examples were hard to get going. Finding information on topics like MSBuild Exec Task command was difficult, the index at the end of the book doesn't help much.

Delivered as promised ...good quality of used book

this book is very complete and answers perfectly my needs. It's well written and very useful when you need to modify your build process and customize it.