Hello Folks. It’s
really interesting to know about MSBuild. Recently while working on one project
we found that deploying Project Files on multiple environment consumes lot of
time. So we thought to take the help of MSBuild and deploy project files on live
Server(s) automatically.
What is MSBuild?
MSBuild is Microsoft
Build Engine for Visual Studio. MSBuild is completely transparent with regards
to how to process and build software developed in Visual Studio.
Why MSBuild?
Initially from Visual
studio we do publish via Publish Profile(s). MSBuild uses that publish profile
and does deployment without the help of visual studio. It can reduce deployment
time up to 70%.
This is the basic Dev
environment which I have created to demonstrate you on Automatic Build.
Developer can publish files to staging as well production Environments.
How MSBuild?
MSBuild command needs
few command line options mainly MSBuild.exe, Visual Studio Project Solution
File (.sln), and Publish Profile.
First of all you need
to get the path of MSBuild.exe in my case it is located at C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\v4.0.30319\msbuild.exe
Create a new File and enter
the below two MSBuild Commands. (Note: You need to change the path according to your project solution directory.)
"C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\v4.0.30319\msbuild.exe"
"C:\Users\npunjabi\Documents\Visual Studio
2013\Projects\DeveloperEnvironment\DeveloperEnvironment.sln"
/p:DeployOnBuild=true /p:PublishProfile"C:\Users\npunjabi\Documents\Visual
Studio 2013\Projects\DeveloperEnvironment\\DeveloperEnvironment\Properties\PublishProfiles\Staging.pubxml"
"C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\v4.0.30319\msbuild.exe"
"C:\Users\npunjabi\Documents\Visual Studio
2013\Projects\DeveloperEnvironment\DeveloperEnvironment.sln"
/p:DeployOnBuild=true /p:PublishProfile"C:\Users\npunjabi\Documents\Visual
Studio 2013\Projects\DeveloperEnvironment\\DeveloperEnvironment\Properties\PublishProfiles\Production.pubxml"
/p:DeployOnBuild=true –
This will build the solution before deployment and will throw an error if build
fails before it deploys the files.
Save this file with
any name and provide extension as “.bat”.
Open Command Prompt
in Administrator Mode and execute the MSBuild (.bat) file.
Note: If you are using
SVN then before deployment you can also write the SVN Command which will update
the solution. After that MSBuild.exe will build the code and then publish.
Please download this file for
more user friendly deployment file which will prompt the user for deployment
whether to start deployment or not on particular servers. Thanks to Kiran Sir (http://kiranpatils.wordpress.com/) for helping me in creating deployment file.