[Mono-dev] xbuild

[Michael Hutchinson]

2008/10/27 Jonathan Chambers <joncham at gmail.com>:
> Hello,
>       I am looking to work on xbuild a bit, and so I started by looking at
> the the current tests and planned on writing some more.

Cool! I really think that xbuild is important, so I'm glad you're
looking at this.

> It looks like there are a substantial number of tests (18) marked NotDotNet.
> Is there a reason we'd have this many tests that don't work on .Net?
>
> Also, some other tests not marked with NotDotNet are failing on .Net? Can I
> assume the tests are wrong if they are failing on .Net?

That's an interesting point, and I really don't know. Looking at these
tests, it seems that they're mostly checking argument error checking.
Given that most people won't be Microsoft.Build.* XBuild APIs
directly, perfect compatibility may not matter, and more stringent
checking might be useful. OTOH, compatibility is also good.

> The documentation for MSBuild on MSDN is a bit sparse. Is there any other
> source of information other than writing tests?

I'm only aware of one MSBuild book, unfortunately, and I don't know if
it's any good.

> Finally, I am trying to work on this in VS and MonoDevelop. Does anyone have
> any guidlines on setting up projects for mcs/class type assemblies? My goal
> is to be able to have projects for MSBuild.* and the xbuild assemblies in a
> solution, and be able to build run them. However, I believe when I run my
> locally built xbuild it will load the MSBuild.* assemblies out of the GAC,
> rather than my locally built ones. Also, xbuild locates Task files based
> upon a mono install layout structure. Any advice for working around these
> issues? I basically am looking for make run type functionality like
> MonoDevelop has.

In this particular case it might be ok to use MONO_PATH.

Probably Ankit can answer these xbuild questions better than I can...

-- 
Michael Hutchinson
http://mjhutchinson.com