Been working with CruiseControl.Net to connect to our CMSynergy source control for some continous integration goodness. While configuring CCNet, I’ve had the oppurtunity to spend some more time with MSBuild - which always makes for some interesting times.
I plan on posting more info once this round is over, but I wanted to make a note about custom tasks from MSBuild. The setup for this, is that I am using a custom task to parse some input files based on how the release is being defined – and then output the files that should be included in the final install package. Without going too much further into detail, the intial condition was that if this is a .0 release, all files are returned.
The task xml looked like:
<CustomTask SourceFiles=”@(SourceFiles)” Release=”$(ReleaseCondition)”>
<OutPut TaskParameter=”PublishFiles” ItemName=”OutFiles”/>
</CustomTask>
The interesting bit to note here, was that just setting the output property to the input property (PublishFiles = SourceFiles) – ended up with the MetaData RecursiveDir on PublishFiles being reset once the output was set to a new variable OutFiles. To get around this, I ended up setting a new custom metadata on the PublishFiles property that copies the RecursiveDir property from SourceFiles.
