What is MSBuild and it's purpose [duplicate]

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MSBuild: What is it, and whe开发者_开发百科n do I need it?

I`ve never used MSBuild and have no idea what is the purpose of MSBuild. It would be nice if anyone describe briefly that in what kind of situation people use MSBuild.

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Basically MsBuild is for building your project/solution. You can use msbuild commandline prompt to build your project rather than right click and build. MsBuild is very useful when it comes to automated build servers where you build projects once somebody checkin any new code.

Another advantage of msbuild is, it's capable to build your project without having VS IDE. You don't need VS IDE to build your project in automated build servers.

Below are few sites that provide good information for you.

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/wea2sca5.aspx MSDN MSBuild Documentation

http://channel9.msdn.com/wiki/default.aspx/MSBuild.HomePage MSBuild Wikki

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/0k6kkbsd.aspx MSBuild Reference

http://blogs.msdn.com/msbuild/default.aspx MSBuild Team Blog

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MSBuild is a build utility from Microsoft, similar to ANT in Java world. It provides a way to define your build requirements, dependency, order etc, by editing xml files. You can use existing tasks, or create custom tasks as per your need and utilize them in the process of build.

ex: you can define a build solution, and set order of projects to build, where to fetch latest data, where to put binaries, where to deploy, whom to inform by sending mail, what to do in the case of errors etc. (Almost everything is a task, and each task may have pre and post conditions)

refer: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/0k6kkbsd.aspx