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TechEd 2004: MSBuild Cabana (DEVC26)
Dion Almaer reports on the MSBuild cabana that he attended; he talks about how the MSBuild team explained the rationale for building a build tool outside of Studio, the fact that MSBuild "will just be there" in Longhorn, and a bit about the questions asked by the crowd.
Dion reports:
I got to check out a cabana talk on the MSBuild project which is scheduled to ship with Whidbey. I really like the cabana style "informal" talks, but there is one problem: It is bloody hard to hear what anyone is saying! This is especially so when a helicopter flies overhead (which happens every 10 minutes). (Editor's note: TechEd is in the downtown San Diego area, which is right next to the US Naval Base down here--I can see an aircraft carrier parked at dock from my hotel room, for example.)
The MSBuild team first talked about the reasoning behind splitting out the build process from Visual Studio. They pushed how great it is to finally be able to pass over a project, to someone who doesn't have studio, and they can still build it (or at least will if they have Whidbey, and in Longhorn). When Longhorn ships it will just be there. This is a build platform.
The team took some questions from the crowd, and gave good answers.
For example, someone asked if MSBuild would support C++ projects. We were then walked through how in the Whidbey release there will be interop between MSBuild and the Visual Studio builds. There is an MSBuild task <vcbuild> which can take a .vcproj file and will do the right thing. This is just the first step though. By the time Longhorn comes around MSBuild will be the king, and there won't be a need for this interop :)
The team discussed some differences as they see them between MSBuild and NAnt. Firstly, they prefaced that they are actively in discussions with the NAnt teams, and that they work closely together. The MSBuild team see their product as a real "platform", whereas NAnt is a "framework". What does this mean? They used the example of dependency analysis. MSBuild does this for you, within the platform itself. Nant requires each task to handle dependencies themselves.
After the questions we got to the demos. They began by showing how you can write your own build files by firing up that lovely IDE: Notepad. Then they went into Visual Studio and showed how you can use the tool to author the build files.
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Message #123430
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TechEd 2004: MSBuild Cabana (DEVC26)
They began by showing how you can write your own build files by firing up that lovely IDE: Notepad. Then they went into Visual Studio and showed how you can use the tool to author the build files. At the PDC last fall, they did the same thing in all of their keynotes: start by showing how everything could be built in notepad or emacs or vi, then demonstrated how the GUI they were designing could do the same thing only faster.
This build system is very interesting. I'd like to see a comparison chart on capabilities and features of Maven, Ant, NAnt, MSBuild. There will be platform specific features, but I'd also like to see what are the best practices beind employed between the systems.
Tyler
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Message #123472
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Finally...
...a build strategy from Microsoft that manages dependencies (as they pointed out) automatically and by design, something that has been a significant pain point in the VS space for years. That and the obligatory tie to Studio itself.
I like the strategy that they've shown, and Tyler pointed out in his post, of showing that all of this at the core can be lightweight and done without extensive GUI use/deployment. Even if you wouldn't want to go the simple, text-based route, it shows that MS is thinking about the core functionality of this system separate from an all-inclusive GUI, which is somewhat of a shift for them and a welcome departure in my book.
Mike
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Message #123561
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Complexity of build systems
Build systems seem to be increasing in features, scriptability and complexity over time. Ant is sure better than Make but somewhat complicated.
Be interesting to see the Microsoft way here, they have always been good at keeping things easy for developers (good).
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