Question

I am writing a utility for my company that will batch build a number of solutions in a one-click fashion. There are about 8 solutions in all, and each one has an average of 20 projects. The utility needs to be able to capture the build log and the total number of errors for each solution, just as is done when you build at the command line. I know I this is the command to accomplish that

msbuild mysolution.sln /t:build /verbosity:minimal /maxcpucount:xx

However, I would like to make use of the Microsoft.Build.Evaluation API’s if possible. I know the Project object can load a single project, but is there anyway to build an entire solution? I intend to build this utility to make use of the all cpus/cores on the system and build multiple solutions simultaneously. I’ve looked at the MSDN page for Microsoft.Build.Evaluation, though the documentation is (still) abysmal.

Thanks for any help you can offer!

Jason

Answer 1

You do not need a Visual Studio solution file (sln) to build multiple projects. As you may know, Visual Studio project files are just MSBuild XML files and they can fall other project files. Therefore, build a project file that builds the other projects as required. This can be done in one of two ways.

First, solution files are just MSBuild XML so anything that can generate XML can generate a solution. See the MSBuild XML Schema for more information.

Second, construct a Microsoft.Build.Evaluation.Project programmatically using the constructor that takes an Microsoft.Build.Construction.ProjectRootElement instance then call Project.Build(). The ProjectRootElement has methods for adding common element types such as CreateTaskElement(), CreatePropertyElement() and CreateTargetElement().

See also:

• Replace .sln with MSBuild and wrap contained projects into targets
• Generating an MSBUILD project file from a visual studio solution file and project files.