After banging my head against the wall for a short period of time I came across Sayed Ibrahim Hashimi’s post about a bug in the RTM of MSBuild.
Basically if you call CreateProperty and CallTarget in the same Target, your new property will not be globally available to other targets. You must move the CreateProperty into a Target by itself.
The funny thing is that Microsoft marked his bug as resolved and said “Good suggestion -- we will look into this for a future version.” Not sure how that resolves the issue…
This will not work:
45 <Target Name="Main">
46 <CreateProperty Value="Hello World!">
47 <Output TaskParameter="Value" PropertyName="MyString" />
48 </CreateProperty>
49 <CallTarget Targets="OutputString" />
50 </Target>
51
52 <Target Name="OutputString">
53 <Message Text="MyString: $(MyString)" />
54 </Target>
And this will work:
45 <Target Name="Main">
46 <CallTarget Targets="SetString" />
47 <CallTarget Targets="OutputString" />
48 </Target>
49
50 <Target Name="SetString">
51 <CreateProperty Value="Hello World!">
52 <Output TaskParameter="Value" PropertyName="MyString" />
53 </CreateProperty>
54 </Target>
55
56 <Target Name="OutputString">
57 <Message Text="MyString: $(MyString)" />
58 </Target>
