[duaneb]

> PS - I have done a lot of .Net development, but rarely did anything beyond the basics with MSBuild directly (mostly via Visual Studio, or took the pre-generated command line and stuck in a script).

This is an excellent reason to avoid MSBuild. IDE lockin is a nightmare.

Might be unavoidable for Visual Studio, though.

[smacktoward]

If your priority is avoiding IDE lock-in and you have somehow ended up a Microsoft developer, you need to closely re-evaluate your life choices.

[radicalbyte]

It depends what you're doing.

If you're making libraries, console applications or doing modern websites it's pretty easy to get your build working without Visual Studio.

One - ELEPHANT SIZE - problem is that for some reason Microsoft only ship the Windows SDKs as part of Visual Studio. Meaning that you'll need to install the IDE at least once to get a build running (you can copy the SDKs around after that).

Microsofties - I know that a lot of dev-div people will be reading - can you shed some light on this situation? What's the reasoning behind not shipping the SDKs separately. I've never had this problem with Java..

[wallyhs]

FWIW, you can install MSBuild without Visual Studio. It's part of the Windows SDK. If your target system is not supported, you have to run it on a supported system and choose the "Download for installation on a separate computer" option. Then copy the resulting msi and cab files to the server and run them. See http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12944502/build-asp-net-4-...

However, after I did this, I had to find build targets that Visual Studio installed and copy them from my workstation into the same directory on the server (i.e. C:\Program Files (x86)\MSBuild\Microsoft\VisualStudio\v11.0\WebApplications).

[radicalbyte]

Yup, that's how I make a build server: clean windows image, MSBuild, then copy the utils, build targets, reference assemblies etc over from a machine containing VS.

It's such a pain that a famous ex-Microsoftie started a connect request for it:

https://visualstudio.uservoice.com/forums/121579-visual-stud...

[vpeters25]

This works fine until you have to build a project with a 3rd party commercial library requiring licenses (.licx files). I just spent a week trying to put together a vagrant vm to build such a project finally giving up and adding visual studio to its provisioning script.

[Locke1689]

Do you mean this[1] Windows SDK?

[1] https://dev.windows.com/en-us/downloads/windows-10-sdk

[radicalbyte]

Fantastic, I hope they keep it up :) Previous SDKs have taken a long time to appear outside of VS :(

[wildmusings]

The SDK has been shipped separately for ages.

[radicalbyte]

With Windows 8 and 8.1 it took a long time for them to be released. Looks like that has been solved now.