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I have a really big project and what i am trying to do is this:

Occasionally, i have to make few (minor) changes in a single class. Since this is a minor change, i really hate to open visual studio (ver 2010) and wait for all projects to load. Instead i open notepad, change that particular file use msbuild.exe to build the entire solution.

Now the question is,

  1. How to get the build status from msbuild.exe ? (i plan to write a nice gui or a web application from which after i invoke this msbuild.exe, i can get the build status, show to the user)

  2. Is this really a good idea to use msbuild.exe in vs2010 or vs2012? (I saw http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms171452(v=vs.90).aspx specify the supported version as Visual studio 2008. Though this is working in vs2010, is this the correct way of doing it?)

thanks in advance.

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Not sure I get the problem, msbuild is plenty chatty enough to show you how the build turned out. It even uses colored output in a console window to highlight errors. – Hans Passant Jul 15 at 14:15
@HansPassant: yes, obviously. But the problem is getting build status occassinally from the MSBUILD.EXE. Say, 10% completed, 50% completed, 100% completed (may be in a thread?) – now he who must not be named. Jul 16 at 5:24

1 Answer

up vote 1 down vote accepted

  1. Don't reinvent the wheel, use a build system that does everything you want (and more) for you. Look at Jenkins for example or TeamCity (see the image on the homepage of the latter: showing progress all over the place..)

  2. Definitely yes. Since VS2010 Visual studio itself uses msbuild to build your projects (since they are msbuild scripts as well). And in some upcoming version even the solution file will be an msbuild file.

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