How to use items to identify the inputs to the build process, like code files.How to use properties to manage variables for the build process.This section provides an overview of the more common elements that you'll encounter when you review, edit, or create a project file. The Anatomy of a Project Fileīefore you look at the build process in more detail, it's worth taking a few moments to familiarize yourself with the basic structure of an MSBuild project file. Over the course of this topic, you'll see how you can take advantage of these capabilities to meet the requirements of your enterprise deployment scenarios.įor more information on how the web application deployment process works, see ASP.NET Web Application Project Deployment Overview. For example, you can run the VSDBCMD.exe command-line tool to deploy a database from a schema file.
You can also call any other executables as part of your build process.
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You can include deployment instructions in your project file, which allows you to build your projects, create web deployment packages, and install these packages on remote servers through a single project file and a single call to MSBuild. The good news is that you can take advantage of the integration points that the WPP provides when you create custom project files for web projects. The WPP essentially brings MSBuild and Web Deploy together to provide a complete build, package, and deployment process for your web applications. The underlying technology behind these capabilities is known as the Web Publishing Pipeline (WPP). The Properties pages for these projects include Package/Publish Web and Package/Publish SQL tabs that you can use to configure how the components of your application are packaged and deployed. If you've worked with web application projects in Visual Studio 2010, like ASP.NET web applications and ASP.NET MVC web applications, you'll know that these projects include built-in support for packaging and deploying the web application to a target environment. targets extension typically don't build anything themselves, they simply contain instructions that you can import into your. targets extension when you create a reusable project file to import into other project files. proj extension when you create a project file that builds projects. However, to make your solutions easier for others to understand, you should use these common conventions: When you create your own project files, you can use any file extension you like. For more information, see Configuring Team Foundation Server for Automated Web Deployment. For example, you can use project files in continuous integration (CI) scenarios to automate deployment to a test environment when new code is checked in. You can also use MSBuild project files with the Team Build service in Team Foundation Server (TFS). These custom project files work in exactly the same way as the project files that Visual Studio generates automatically. As a developer, you can craft your own MSBuild project files, using the MSBuild XML schema, to impose sophisticated and fine-grained control over how your projects are built and deployed. NET Framework, and you can run it from a command prompt. In addition, you don't need to install Visual Studio in order to use the MSBuild engine-the MSBuild.exe executable is part of the. MSBuild project files are based on the MSBuild XML schema, and as a result the build process is entirely open and transparent. The project file is an XML document that contains all the information and instructions that MSBuild needs in order to build your project, like the content to include, the platform requirements, versioning information, web server or database server settings, and the tasks that must be performed.
In order to build a project, MSBuild must process the project file associated with the project. Every Visual Studio project includes an MSBuild project file, with a file extension that reflects the type of project-for example, a C# project (.csproj), a Visual Basic.NET project (.vbproj), or a database project (.dbproj). When you create and build solutions in Visual Studio, Visual Studio uses MSBuild to build each project in your solution.