October 2005 Blog Posts
It's encouraging to see people thinking and acting on my presentation (encouraging? Heck, I'm smug about it!). Charles Cook noticed that a Visual Studio generated project has multiple ItemGroups in it (forgive me for stealing your example Charles!)
<Project DefaultTargets="Build"
xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/developer/msbuild/2003">
<ItemGroup>
<Reference Include="System" />
</ItemGroup>
<ItemGroup>
<Compile Include="Program.cs" />
<Compile Include="Properties\AssemblyInfo.cs" />
</ItemGroup>
<Import Project="$(MSBuildBinPath)\Microsoft.CSharp.targets" />
</Project>
As Charles points out this is functionality equivilant to a single item group
<Project DefaultTargets="Build"
xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/developer/msbuild/2003">
<ItemGroup>
<Reference Include="System" />
<Compile Include="Program.cs" />
<Compile Include="Properties\AssemblyInfo.cs" />
</ItemGroup>
<Import Project="$(MSBuildBinPath)\Microsoft.CSharp.targets" />
</Project>
So the question arises why have or allow multiple ItemGroups. First we need to look at what an Item is, in MSBuild Terms. Items are inputs into the build, grouped into...
As the comments on the second Developer Day start to hit blogs around the country it is rather ego inflating to see my name in "lights". Last time we were scored by attendees and I assume this time we'll be scored as well, although as I missed the speaker briefing due to the traffic jam at the entrance to the Microsoft Campus I completely forgot to remind people to fill in their score sheets. This may not be a bad thing though because, as usual, I got carried away <g>
The problem with scoring sheets though is you don't get any...
Well that was fun! First there was the traffic jam getting into the Microsoft Campus 45 minutes before it starts, but 15 minutes before the speaker briefing (sorry Melita!) and managed to sit down with Annie who was highly amused to be called a big name speaker. I was highly amused when, upon booting her laptop the hard drive went rather weird and error messages complaining about missing system directories appeared. Panic ensued. I volunteered to dash home to get my identical work laptop, and we could put her drive in an external usb enclosure and copy files. As she...
It looks like MS might be listening again, clicten is researching adding targets to msbuild to produce 1.1 framework code. He's gauging interest, so go, tell him you're interested. Why is this important? Well I've discovered resistance in a certain type of customer to introducing nant, because of the gpl and concerns around its use. Regardless of the correctness of the concerns an offical Microsoft supported solution would solve a lot of problems and allow me to introduce daily builds without ugly hacks.
None of this should take away from Robert McLaw's work on the MSBuild Toolkit for 2005, which does...
Thu 2005-10-13 06:13:26: <-- 550 5.7.1 <Your e-mail was rejected by an anti-spam content filter on gateway (207.46.121.53).Reasons for rejection may be: obscene language, graphics, or spam-like characteristics. Removing these may let the e-mail through the filter.>
What? You can't swear in emails to microsoft.com any more? Well that's going to cut down on emails to technical support <g>
Good (?) news; the next Developer Day agenda is up and yet again you have the chance to listen to my dulcet tones on Saturday the 22nd October. This time around I'll be talking about the new build engine for the .net framework, MSBuild.
Distributed as part of the framework it provides a customisable, extensible, open (errr, don't start GNU people, please) build engine which you can use with or without Visual Studio. It even provides the underpinnings for Team Build, part of Team System. So come along, learn about it, learn how to extend it and watch me, as ever,...
(If anyone noticed). The hard drive finally died on my web server, after 4-5 years. Not bad at all really. All I can say is thank heaven for nightly disk images. After upgraded from a 10Gb drive to a 180Gb drive I've moved the inetpub to a separate drive to the OS (time to put what I preach into action). There shouldn't be any problems, but if anyone sees any weirdness please drop me a mail or leave a comment.