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MSBuild is now open source on GitHub

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Re: MSBuild is now open source on GitHub

#101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. Rob was just being an annoying prick.

Jees, what is your issue seriously? It's all just a bit of fun; there is no need to get directly insulting over it.

Maybe you overestimate how funny you are.

Re: MSBuild is now open source on GitHub

#102
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Visual Studio uses MSBuild. csproj/vbproj files are MSBuild files. MSBuild will take an SLN file as an argument and do the same as Visual Studio would do with it when you load it and click build.

Correct, VS commandline calls MSBuild. They're using MSBuild, they just don't know it.

incorrect, the visual studio solution file has build configuration details that msbuild will not honour (e.g. you can specify certain build order parameters), as I found out recently with a project I took over. (I was wondering why building from the command line with ms build produced different results).

Re: MSBuild is now open source on GitHub

#104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought it was funny, why are people so touchy about it?

PR are not the place for jokes. Developers have enough to do managing their projects, they don't need to waste time sorting through jokes. You might say, "it's just one joke, what's the big deal?" One joke, attracts others. Everyone thinks they're funny and their joke with worth everyone else's time to read it. If PR become a place that's acceptable to make jokes, it'll be flooded with noise.

> PR are not the place for jokes.

There's a well-established tradition of pull requests and issues being used for commentary and humor.

Here's a selection. The first one is by the founder CEO of a company with a ~$1B valuation that's prepping for an IPO and is very similar to the one everyone here is complaining about. The second one has comments from a couple well-known tech folks. And so on...

https://github.com/saberma/shopqi/pull/409

https://github.com/h5bp/html5-boilerplate/pull/1074

https://github.com/ericf/yui3-gallery/pull/21

https://github.com/WhiteHouse/fortyfour/issues

https://github.com/joyent/node/pull/2472

But apparently now that Microsoft is using GitHub, everything is Serious Business™? Is there a dress code now, too?

Re: MSBuild is now open source on GitHub

#105
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah; I've had to deal with MSBuild, and I've never really liked it. I have to assume that the big motivation was that they'd prefer to port MSBuild to OS X and Linux than to port MS solution files and MS project files to CMake, Automake, or some other build system.

I haven't gotten past the point of where I just hit Ctrl-F5 and Visual Studio builds stuff for me with MSBuild, so I am certainly no expert on it. But I never had the impression that people liked CMake or Automake either. I ask this not as a rhetorical question but as an actual one: are there build systems that aren't hated, or does everyone just hate the one they have to use the most?

Everybody hates some aspects of some of them, in my experience. People also tend to have strongly held preferences in the build system department - it's a bit like text editors. I tend to view it as problem-dependent as to which system is better. If you're all java, you probably want a build tool designed for that language (for example.) Lisp has asdf and friends. My focus (cross platform C/C++ building) has led me to deal with autotools and CMake. I prefer CMake for 3 major reasons: 1) self contained - you just install CMake itself and you can handle all sorts of things (tar.bz2 decompression, file copying, directory creation, etc.) automatically and portably. No need to first install Python or Perl or... whatever for Windows. From a Linux/*BSD perspective, developing on Windows is like crossing the Sahara - you need to carry your own supplies. CMake packs a lot into a small, self contained package. 2) Learn one language and you're done. Would it have been better to go with something like lua? Probably, in hindsight (my opinion). However, compared to the mind bending complexity that is sh + m4 + automake + autoconf + ... CMake is (in my experience) quite a lot easier to get a handle on. 3) Wide support for many platforms/tools (Visual Studio, Xcode, ninja, make, Eclipse, etc.) from one common set of build definitions. The maintenance savings really add up if you need to support all those tools - Hunt and Thomas's DRY principle in action.

Re: MSBuild is now open source on GitHub

#106
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah; I've had to deal with MSBuild, and I've never really liked it. I have to assume that the big motivation was that they'd prefer to port MSBuild to OS X and Linux than to port MS solution files and MS project files to CMake, Automake, or some other build system.

I haven't gotten past the point of where I just hit Ctrl-F5 and Visual Studio builds stuff for me with MSBuild, so I am certainly no expert on it. But I never had the impression that people liked CMake or Automake either. I ask this not as a rhetorical question but as an actual one: are there build systems that aren't hated, or does everyone just hate the one they have to use the most?

I was working on adding unusual steps to the build. Things like "run the Protocol Buffers compiler on these files" (which, in the end, I just did through a batch file), and making sure the solution could be built on our CI server (at the time, that was Cruise Control but we eventually switched to Jenkins). It was no worse than Apache Ant in my experience (but I'm no fan of Apache Ant).

The project I worked on was relatively new. Another project had been started in Visual C++ 6 and upgraded multiple times over the years. Occasionally, somebody would go through the solution file and project files to see if we were doing silly things because of this evolution (e.g., defining rules that weren't ever used). And we had two or three ways of setting paths so that developers could check out the code and build without worrying too much. Especially when it came to projects that needed DLLs from other solutions.

We were able to reduce the amount of annoying things to a tolerable level. I believe they moved to something like NuGet (for some things) after I switched jobs.

Re: MSBuild is now open source on GitHub

#107
Fantastic. As a .NET Developer, who has been forced into doing Ruby and Java development, I really miss the .NET framework and c#. I'm hoping that this move toward open source will help more open-source projects adopt .NET. C# is such a wonderful language and anything that helps make it more mainstream in the open-source community is a Good Thing.

Re: MSBuild is now open source on GitHub

#108

Fantastic. As a .NET Developer, who has been forced into doing Ruby and Java development, I really miss the .NET framework and c#. I'm hoping that this move toward open source will help more open-source projects adopt .NET. C# is such a wonderful language and anything that helps make it more mainstream in the open-source community is a Good Thing.

Not that Ruby and Java are "bad". I just will always have a special place in my heart for c#, as it was my first language.

Re: MSBuild is now open source on GitHub

#109
post #44
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like autotools more than MSBuild if that's any reference...

I admit this is biased, heavily so in fact, but most of what I know about autotools comes from this: http://voices.canonical.com/jussi.pakkanen/2011/09/13/autoto... Which... the reason it sticks out with me is that really good rants are a lot more memorable to me than people talking about what software they like, which is probably not a fair way to evaluate software.

I liked https://www.varnish-cache.org/docs/trunk/phk/autocrap.html myself.

Re: MSBuild is now open source on GitHub

#110
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I could just build in exactly the same way, using the same solution/project files, on my dev box and my build server Do you run VS on your production servers? Because that's where it will shit a brick because you forgot to install ASP.Net MVC KB123123213 but the IDE installed it as part of update 4. Etc etc... This problem gets VERY deep.

Do you run VS on your production servers? Why would I have any build system installed on a production server ?

For CI? Gotta run your builds somewhere, and a build agent is a production application.
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