Inside the Microsoft Build Engine: Using MSbuild and Team Foundation Build [Anglais] [Broché]

First off, this is a fantastic book. I used the 1st edition with TFS 2008. This new edition includes great content for the new, completely revamped, build workflow process in TFS 2010.

However, as a new Kindle user, when I went to purchase the second edition, I ended up with the wrong one. After returning it via the Amazon Kindle return process (which is pretty painless), I was able to get the correct version. I wish Amazon had a better way of classifying/naming their book versions. They should call the Kindle versions "Version 1" and Version 2" to coincide with the book versions. Instead, there is the regular Kindle version (which is the new one!) and the Kindle "November 11, 2009" edition. Hover your mouse cursor over the Kindle links to see which picture appears. If you want the newer edition, be sure to click on the Kindle link with a "2" appearing in the picture of the cover.

As with any IT books for the Kindle, watch for missing content. I've been seeing this problem with a lot of IT books from Amazon. Maybe we need to create a web site called MissingKindleContent.com or a way (unknown to me!) to report Kindle errors to Amazon so they can fix it.

So far, no problems with this book. Big thumbs up!

Overall the book has a lot of MSBuild detail, it fills in many gaps that are missing from Microsoft's documentation, and it demonstrates some practical features that anyone using MSBuild would find useful. This is for the developer or build master that would like to learn a little or a lot more on tweaking the MSBuild engine. The authors know MSBuild very well and provide example after example of good practices when putting together an MSBuild (XML) project file.

If you didn't already know it, MSBuild is an effective way to "script" the build using XML markup based on Commontypes.xsd and Core.xsd Schema Definitions. This means Intellisense is available when working with the XML project file's markup.

Although it's labeled as an Intermediate/Advanced book, the Quick Start sections found throughout the book are very helpful at any level. These have some "Hello World" examples that quickly illustrate some of the features that MSBuild has. As you are ready for more material and detail, the authors' Deep Dive chapters drill into the specifics.

The book is well organized into seven parts and literally covers about a hundred topics. The authors also did well with the table of contents. Quickly find the general subject then drill down and find your specific topic. That works well when you have a vague idea of the task you need. Each topic is sort of a "build use case" with MSBuild and a way to help form the build process to meet your needs.

Also covered is setting up custom tasks and logs of the build. MSBuild has two loggers out of the box: Console and File Logging. With logging, you can extend MSBuild by implementing your own ILogger interface using .NET code. For example, writing to a database. MSBuild takes another step up with an event handling system. So you can tie into key build events, perform an operation, then return from a hand-coded event handler.

I consider this a well-rounded and complete guide to the MSBuild tool that comes with Visual Studio .NET. It's a good reference book to help control a very powerful build engine. The documentation from Microsoft is very terse with no How-To sections. This book is a long list of How-To topics using MSBuild.

Note: Originally published by the Denver Visual Studio User Group at [..]

This is a great reference to understanding MSbuild and the other Microsoft technology that depends on it. Even if you do not use TFS in your build cycle this is a must have book.