Visual-studio – Why does Nant driven MsBuild compile to different directory on different machines

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I wrote a Nant script that executes MSBUILD.exe to compile a project on my dev machine. On my dev machine, the projects builds its output to bin\x86\Release and my Nant script zips up the contents of that directory. I then commit everything to SVN and let TeamCity run the Nant script that executes MSBUILD.exe to compile the project and zip the output, but the output is created in bin\Release and the zip file is empty because it looks in bin\x86\Release. Why does this happen?

When I make changes to the configuration and platform in VS.NET 2008, I do not see the project file light up as being changed. Are these settings stored in the project file, solution file, or user configuration file and therefore not carried over to the build server?

Best Answer

Quick fix: You can use the flag /property:OutDir=bin\x86\Release

You would have to find root cause of this. Probably configuration is incorrect. You can change configuration explicitly to something like /p:Configuration=Release

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Visual-studio – Displaying build times in Visual Studio

Menu Tools → Options → Projects and Solutions → VC++ Project Settings → Build Timing should work.

NAnt and MSBuild command line woes

Rather than invoke MSBuild directly, I'd suggest using the NAnt-Contrib msbuild task.

For instance, in my Protocol Buffers project I have this:

<target name="build"
        description="Builds all C# code">
  <msbuild project="${src}/ProtocolBuffers.sln">
    <property name="Configuration"
              value="${build-configuration}" />
  </msbuild>
</target>

When build-configuration is Release it doesn't build the PDBs. This depends on how you've got the project set up in Visual Studio though - you can still build PDBs for the optimised release version.

EDIT: As for the "extra junk" stuff - it will do whatever a build in Visual Studio does. If you can mess around in VS to switch various options the way you want them, it should work fine from NAnt/MSBuild too.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Visual-studio – Displaying build times in Visual Studio

NAnt and MSBuild command line woes

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