Question

I’ve just learned the hard way that Visual Studio 2010 and MSBuild extremely lenient when it comes to which vcxproj MSBuild files they will successfully execute – they will overlook missing configurations for subtasks and single files and still successfully execute the build tasks. However this is causing problems for me as it is leading to inconsistent builds across multiple configurations, plus due to the internal inconsistencies in the project files I cannot necessarily edit them in Visual Studio’s property view.

So far I have managed to get rid of the most problematic inconsistencies by editing the vcxproj files by hand but this is not really an acceptable strategy given that this particular solution contains over 80 project files.

Is there a tool that can check an MSBuild file for internal consistency and highlight missing configurations along the lines of “your project files says it offers configurations X, Y and Z but the custom build task for file X only supports configurations X and Z”?

Update: The specific problem I am trying to solve right now as opposed to the more general problem of linting the vcxproj file is that of missing conditionals for certain configurations. Unfortunately adding and updating the conditionals seems to require a little more than I can safely accomplish using a find-and-replace tool. Doing it programmatically and correctly would most likely require DOM manipulation and given that I am rather familiar with the internal structure of the build files so far it appears that using a text editor that is able to do basic structural XML validation is the quickest way to accomplish the task at hand.

What I would really like to see however would be a tool that can at least highlight these problems automatically to cut down on the time spent tracking them down.

Answer 1

Configurations are, in general, a VS concept. They are not built-in to MSBuild but achieved using Conditional attributes on property groups. Most likely your project files are valid MSBuild projects, but some of them don’t build with default parameters – I’d suggest not to edit them by hand, but either

• use a find-and-replace tool to fix them
• write a small app that uses Microsoft.Build.Construction API to inspect and fix the project files

There’s nothing that would perform this for you, I’m afraid.