MSBuild VS FAKE

msbuild is the "make" system, but for .Net. Those .csproj files are just makefiles by another name. Also, msbuild is not Windows-only. The readme specifically states that it can run on Unix (and Unix-like) systems that support .Net Core.

You can't do without source files when you want to better understand what is happening "under the hood" of a particular system. For example, do you want to improve your understanding of how types from the standard library work? The source code of .NET Framework and .NET will help you to do that. Do you want to dig deeper into the compiler? No problem - here is the Roslyn's source code at your service. Do you need to look inside the build system? Here you go - the MSBuild code is also open-source. By the way, if you are interested in build processes, you may also find MSBuild Structured Log Viewer useful. It's a tool that allows you to work with MSBuild build logs in a convenient format.

I have a .NET 6 project that includes some Exec nodes, and those commands are failing because (as in this discussion on the msbuild repo) the paths of the generated tmp.exec.cmd files are not whitelisted.

At the moment, we plan to implement the specified functionality for the C# analyzer. It's easy to obtain the list of dependencies for a C# project. Roslyn helps us a lot — our analyzer is built on its base. To be more precise, the main factor is the use of the same build platform (MSBuild) and a compiler for all C# projects. At the same time Roslyn is closely related to MSBuild. This makes obtaining the dependencies list trivial.

I hope one day Microsoft will deprecate their non-unicode API, remove that TCHAR mess. I think they supported these legacy APIs long ey already. There's still a problem with PATH_MAX, see, for example, the dotnet MSBuild[1]. Maybe even switch to the UTF-8 instead.

[1] https://github.com/dotnet/msbuild/issues/53

https://github.com/dotnet/msbuild is up there too.

Take a look at this issue. https://github.com/dotnet/msbuild/issues/2008

MSBuild and the Roslyn compiler are cross-platform. So the short answer is yes.

You may use other tools too: psake, make, cake, fake or any other *ake you are familiar with. I look at them as a tools that make build tasks behind simple commands and help me answer: How did I run that code again?

NAnt was quite a popular build tool used by projects of all sizes targeting .NET Framework on Windows. I have written many complex build systems using NAnt in the past. But XML based DSL was quite clunky to use and maintain. Besides, it was always a daunting task to explain to a new dev on the team. With .NET Core/.NET becoming a cross-platform framework, CAKE and FAKE gained a lot of adoption providing a C# and F# based DSL for build tasks accordingly.

Check out https://fsprojects.github.io/Paket/ and https://fake.build/ and https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/fsharp/get-started/get-started-vscode for playing with F#.

Cake and Fake are both quite popular in the OSS world.