Question

My manager is forcing me to use MSBuild for building my application.

I developed my application in ASP.NET MVC.

Here are some questions I have:

1. what are the advantages of MSBuild?
2. Is there any other build tool better than MSBuild?
3. What are the drawbacks on simple build of projects?

Answer 1

MSBuild is great. It is similar in concept to NAnt, but slightly different with some of its tasks or implementations.

Once you get used to it, you will be cranking out the build files. Take a look at a csproj file – it is a MSBuild file (note that the .sln solution file is very similar to an MSBuild file but it technically isn’t a MSBuild file (yet))*. Building custom tasks for it is very simple, there are plenty of guides on teh interweb which walk you through how to do it.

If you are looking for alternatives, then i would go to NAnt. It is free, and has a huge amount of community support and extra tasks available. I haven’t used it for a few years though, so i can’t comment on its exact state at the moment.

There are no real drawbacks to using MSBuild, unless you count the amount of time it will take to get up to speed with it, and the amount of time you have to spend researching it.

From your questions it sounds like you don’t really have much of a build process in place – take the time to do it, once you have you will wonder why you didn’t do it sooner.

_{* Edited in response to comment from Sayed Ibrahim Hashimi}