Extending MSBuild

Summary

In this chapter, we presented the two most extensible aspects of MSBuild: custom loggers and custom tasks. We discussed how you can hook into the MSBuild logging process to create your own logger that meets the specific needs of your application if necessary. We covered how to create custom tasks to perform steps unattainable from existing MSBuild tasks. During this, we also discussed incremental building and how you can create targets and tasks that support it. We showed how to cleanly extend the build and clean process that MSBuild currently has in place. With these tools, you should be able to customize the build to meet the needs of your applications. All of the source code for this chapter is available in the Source Code section of the Apress Web site (http://www.apress.com). For brevity reasons, some details of that code could not be covered; for more information, see the source files.