grunt-msbuild

Build projects with MSBuild and XBuild using Grunt

Getting Started

This plugin requires Grunt ~0.4.0. In other words it should work on 0.4.0 or higher.

If you haven't used Grunt before, be sure to check out the Getting Started guide, as it explains how to create a Gruntfile as well as install and use Grunt plugins. Once you're familiar with that process, you may install this plugin with this command:

npm install grunt-msbuild --save-dev

Once the plugin has been installed, it may be enabled inside your Gruntfile with this line of JavaScript:

grunt.loadNpmTasks('grunt-msbuild');

The "msbuild" task

Overview

In your project's Gruntfile, add a section named msbuild to the data object passed into grunt.initConfig().

grunt.initConfig({
    msbuild: {
        dev: {
            src: ['ConsoleApplication5.csproj'],
            options: {
                projectConfiguration: 'Debug',
                targets: ['Clean', 'Rebuild'],
                stdout: true,
                version: 4.0,
                maxCpuCount: 4,
                buildParameters: {
                    WarningLevel: 2
                },
                verbosity: 'quiet'
            }
        }
    }
});

MSBuild version selection

Pass a version parameter to the task options as shown above to select a specific MSBuild version.

The version number is used to look up the .NET version and find the .NET Framework directory location on disk. The following version mappings are used:

Version	.NET Framework directory
1.0	1.0.3705
1.1	1.1.4322
2.0	2.0.50727
3.5	3.5
4.0	4.0.30319

If a version is not passed the task will attempt to locate version 12 of MSBuild which is installed with Visual Studio 2013, and will then fallback to 4.0

XBuild

If this task is run on OS X or Linux it will assume that xbuild is in the path and use that instead of MSBuild

Contributing

All contributions welcome :) Add to the VS integration tests for any new or changed functionality if possible.