Visual Studio（2010）内部版本与MSBuild从命令行的不同行为

Question

I am trying to customize my solution with a custom MSBuild target, which modifies AssemblyVersion and AssemblyFileVersion assembly attributes and puts either build number from CI or just increments the current value of one if we are building on the local machine. I have placed that custom target as a dependency for the BeforeBuild standard target so it should be executing before every build:

  <Target Name="BeforeBuild" DependsOnTargets="VersionTag" />

And I am experiencing the following issue. When I am building from the command line, things are good, and AssemblyInfo.cs files are being modified before build, and new version numbers come to newly built assemblies.

But when I am building from within the Visual Studio, assemblies are getting the old version numbers, and AssemblyInfo.cs files are being modified after the actual build. The Output window shows something like this - please note that compilation warnings and "Compile complete" message are being shown before the "Build started" message:

------ Rebuild All started: Project: CommonModel, Configuration: Debug Any CPU ------
C:\Applications\Domain\CommonModel\History\CommonHistory.cs(7,42): warning CS0108: 'Domain.CommonModel.History.CommonHistory.Parent' hides inherited member 'Domain.CommonModel.Common.Parent'. Use the new keyword if hiding was intended.
C:\Applications\Domain\CommonModel\Common.cs(36,35): (Related location)

Compile complete -- 0 errors, 14 warnings
Build started 6/5/2014 6:40:00 PM.
CoreClean:
  Deleting file "C:\Applications\Domain\CommonModel\bin\Debug\Domain.CommonModel.dll.config".
  Deleting file "C:\Applications\Domain\CommonModel\bin\Debug\Domain.CommonModel.dll".
  Deleting file "C:\Applications\Domain\CommonModel\bin\Debug\Domain.CommonModel.pdb".

. . .

Knowing that VS uses MSBuild at the background I was expecting the same behavior for both kinds of builds, at least with the sequence of core events. So now I am slightly confused if there is a chance to bring VS and command line build into consistence.

Answer 1

There are many differences between MSBuild and VS. For one, many .targets files, including ones that come with .NET/VS, have stuff with Condition="'$(BuildingInsideVisualStudio)' == 'true'" . Also, VS takes many shortcuts in generating the dependency tree of the solution.

As for your issue: I dislike the practice of overriding targets like BeforeBuild . What if 2 people did this? The latter would overwrite the former. Instead, use MSBuild 3 and later's BeforeTargets feature - in your case, you'd just have your target as:

<Target Name="VersionTag" BeforeTargets="BeforeBuild">(...)

...And maybe that would fix your issue as well.

If not, you could increase MSBuild logging level (Tools=>Options=>Projects and Solutions => Build and Run), and then the log will tell you more.