A new chapter
was written in Microsoft’s history when it announced open
sourcing its .NET Framework at VS Connect event in New York last year. To
continue the chapter, Microsoft today open sourced its Visual Studio build
engine, Microsoft Build.
Today,
Microsoft announced that it is open sourcing MSBuild. The MSBuild is being
contributed to the .NET Foundation and is now available on GitHub to download,
share, and contribute.
MSBuild
Components includes MSBuild.exe, Microsoft.Build namespaces,
Microsoft.Build.Framework namespace, Microsoft.Build.Tasks, Microsoft.Build.Utilities
namespace.
“MSBuild is being contributed to the .NET Foundation”
Definition from MSDN:
Microsoft
Build Engine is a platform for building applications. This engine, which is
also known as MSBuild, provides an XML schema for a project file that controls
how the build platform processes and builds software. Visual Studio uses
MSBuild, but it doesn't depend on Visual Studio. By invoking msbuild.exe on
your project or solution file, you can orchestrate and build products in
environments where Visual Studio isn't installed.
Visual
Studio uses MSBuild to load and build managed projects. The project files in
Visual Studio (.csproj,.vbproj, vcxproj, and others) contain MSBuild XML code
that executes when you build a project by using the IDE. Visual Studio projects
import all the necessary settings and build processes to do typical development
work, but you can extend or modify them from within Visual Studio or by using
an XML editor.