My Review of Inside the Microsoft® Build Engine

May 6, 2011 in REVIEWS
msbuild reviews
2 min read
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      Your practical guide to using, customizing, and extending the build engine in Visual Studio 2010.
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  <a href="http://oreilly.com/catalog/0790145301949" style="display: none;" class="url fn"><span class="fn">Inside the Microsoft&reg; Build Engine</span></a></div> 
  
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    <strong class="summary">Quite a LOT of information</strong>
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    By <strong>Jim</strong> from <strong>Herndon, VA</strong> on <strong><abbr title="201155T1200-0800" class="dtreviewed" style="border: none; text-decoration: none;">5/5/2011</abbr></strong>
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    <span class="rating">5</span>out of 5
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    <strong>Pros: </strong>Concise, Easy to understand, Accurate, Well-written, Helpful examples
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    <strong>Best Uses: </strong>Intermediate, Expert
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    <strong>Describe Yourself: </strong>Developer
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    I&#8217;ve reviewed this book as part of O&#8217;Reilly&#8217;s blogger program.<br xmlns:pr="xalan://com.pufferfish.core.beans.xmlbuilders.xsl.Functions" /><br />I have previously used MSBuild and Windows Installer XML for build and deploy scenarios. Before reading &#8220;Inside the Microsoft Build Engine&#8221;, I considered my understanding of MSBuild to be fairly in-depth. After reading through this book, I now realize that I&#8217;ve not used MSBuild to its full potential.
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    This book covers a lot, from the basics of ItemGroups and PropertyGroups, to writing custom tasks and loggers, to using MSBuild for the more complicated build process of Visual C++ projects.
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    Recently, I was on a team which used MSBuild and msdeploy.exe for building and deploying a web application. Researching and implementing a solution with proper configuration took the better part of two days. The last three chapters of this book cover web application build/deployment scenarios and would have been very useful if I had this book as a reference a few months ago.
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