New Direction for the MSBuild Toolkit

Wednesday, November 9, 2005

Microsoft officially announced today that they will unofficially support MSBuild compiling to the .NET Framework 1.1. Called MSBee (the MSBuild Everett Environment), this tool will consist of new .targets files and MSBuild Tasks to round out the feature set that I had been supporting with previous versions of my kit.

This new package from Microsoft will fix the following limitations of my .targets files:

Resolving COM References
Generating resources
Resolving .NET version-specific managed references

Therefore, there is no need to continue adding this functionality to my Toolkit. Instead, I'm still going to finish my redesign of the Visual Studio 2005 add-in, and see if I can't add some other MSBuild-related features to it. With Craig's help, I'm going to make sure that my add-in not only supports their .targets files, but makes the process of including them in VS2005 projects dirt simple.

Just so you know, I'm also waiting for Microsoft to finish the "Web Deployment Project" VS2005 template, so that my add-in can tie it and MSBee together to compile web applications to .NET 1.1. With these three components tied together, Visual Studio 2005 should be a LOT more powerful.

As soon as I have it wrapped up, I'll push it out the door. Thanks for your patience :)

thanks for your efforts!

i'm anxiously awaiting for this capability.

hong son - Wednesday, November 9, 2005 6:05:00 PM

Will this support VB.NET too, or is it just for C#? :-(

Alex - Thursday, November 10, 2005 5:24:00 PM

Anything I put out will always support both languages ;).

Robert McLaws - Friday, November 11, 2005 7:15:00 AM

A true man of the people :-) Thankyou!

Alex - Friday, November 11, 2005 10:42:00 AM

Looks like MSBee is going to take 3-4 months before its out of the door. Can you put out a release which would work with VS2005 sooner? Thanks for the great work.

Kisk - Sunday, November 20, 2005 12:34:00 AM

I haven't read anything about any of the solutions supporting intellisense for 1.1. Is this a separate problem that won't be addressed? It's nice to be able to build the projects with a single environment, but I'd still like to maintain my 1.1 app with 05, but I've become too dependent on intellisense with so many libraries and versions to write to these days.

Keith Patrick - Monday, November 28, 2005 9:31:00 PM

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