Our solution has got a ton of projects in it, and our MSBuild file is becoming a gigantic, unstable morass of angle brackets that has gotten so large that I’ve begun to be scared to touch it. However, I noticed that most of our projects fall into two groups.
There are web projects, which have a .csproj extension and are built and deployed using web deployment projects to dump them into a directory. There is also a configuration transform process. Basically, to deploy a web project, one only needs the project name, the output directory, and the config transforms.
Similarly, we have an ever-increasing number of service apps that will live under TopShelf. These are basically dlls that are built from .csproj files. Like the above websites, they undergo a config transform, but they are copied to the output directory instead of going through the web deployment steps.
It occurred to me that it would be really slick if I could simply provide the MSBuild project with a couple of text files (one for the webs and the other for the services) that MSBuild could then use to dynamically compile all the various projects. I was thinking that if I could just feed it a comma-delimited list of projects, output locations, and config replacement files that there might be a way to get msbuild to read them in, iterate over them, and dump out the projects where they are supposed to go.
However, my MSBuild-fu is weak. How do I even get started on this?
You can start here, this is part 2.
For config files I’m using XmlPreprocess tool for config files manipulation. It is using one mapping file for multiple environments. You can edit mapping file by Excel. It is very easy to use.