[MonoDevelop] Moving to MSBuild

[Michael Hutchinson]

On Sun, May 18, 2008 at 10:07 PM, Michael Hutchinson
<m.j.hutchinson at gmail.com> wrote:
>> - Does MSBuild contain an standard (different than the .sln format,
>> which you said was not part of it) for solutions? It's not clear to me
>> yet why this type of files are not XML-based yet...
>
> Good question; I'm not completely sure. I think that the concept of a
> "solution" isn't really required for a build system, and is a
> convenience for IDEs. It's basically just a list of "projects" that
> the IDE opens in one go. It also provides an environement for
> resolving project references BUT this is any because the C#/VB
> references resolution tasks do it this way. MSBuild's aware of it but
> I don't think it's really a core feature as such.
>
> Think of them sort of like xml Makefiles. There's no such thing as a
> Makefile "solution" :-)

On further investigation, I found they have something called a
"traversal project", which they apparently generate from sln files and
cache on disc:

http://blogs.msdn.com/msbuild/archive/2007/04/13/recursion-and-itemgroups-inside-targets.aspx
http://blogs.infosupport.com/raimondb/archive/2006/05/22/msbuildemit.aspx
http://www.vsou.com/Overriding-the-ToolsVersion-for-Your-Projects-in-Team-Build_20080325_23988/

Also, msbuild files can build a set of solutions:
http://blogs.msdn.com/aaronhallberg/archive/2008/04/28/solution-specific-output-directories-in-visual-studio-2008-orcas.aspx

-- 
Michael Hutchinson
http://mjhutchinson.com