Waaargh.NET

Using the Microsoft SDC MSbuild tasks

Microsoft Research UK has released a number of 'extra' tasks for MSBuild on gotdotnet. You can find the workspace here. These tasks include a number of common things, like file management, source control etc... You can find a complete list of tasks at Jamie Cansdale's NunitAddin weblog here.

The mechanism for using custom tasks in MSBuild is with an <Import/> statement in your build file.

<Import Project="C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.40607\Microsoft.Sdc.Tasks"/>

After that, you can use the tasks in your build file and msbuild will recognize them.

Of course, you still need to create the '.tasks' file that points the msbuild framework to the assembly that contains the task. This mechanism is widely used by the msbuild framework and in itself, its just a build file that uses the <UsingTask> task :-). It looks like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<Project xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/developer/msbuild/2003">
  <UsingTask AssemblyName="Microsoft.Sdc.Tasks, Version=2.0.5000.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=e24a7ed7109b7e39" TaskName="Microsoft.Sdc.Tasks.ActiveDirectory.Group.AddUser" />
  <UsingTask AssemblyName="Microsoft.Sdc.Tasks, Version=2.0.5000.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=e24a7ed7109b7e39" TaskName="Microsoft.Sdc.Tasks.ActiveDirectory.Group.Create" />
  <UsingTask AssemblyName="Microsoft.Sdc.Tasks, Version=2.0.5000.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=e24a7ed7109b7e39" TaskName="Microsoft.Sdc.Tasks.ActiveDirectory.User.Create" />
...
</Project>

Next, you put this file and the assembly in the .NET framework folder (c:\windows\microsoft.net\framework\v2.0.40607).

I was getting errors running the SDC tasks because they seemed to overlap tasks already present in the basic MSBuild framework (I don't know if this was related to my desktop install or something else). Just renaming the '.tasks' file that came with the SDC tasks to '.tasks2' and updating my import statement above made the errors go away. (spooky :))

By doing these three simple things, you can start using custom tasks in your build files:
1. create a '.tasks' file that lists the custom tasks in an assembly
2. copy the '.tasks' file and the assembly somewhere msbuild will find them (the framework dir is the easiest)
3. use an <import> statement to reference the tasks in your build file

How to use the SDC tasks:
When you extract the zipfile from the gotdotnet workspace, you should look in the following folder:
<zipfile>\Microsoft.Sdc.Tasks\MainTempGDN\Framework2.0

In this folder, you will find another zipfile, called 'GDN2.0.041008.124.zip'. Extract this zipfile and look in the following folder:
<new zipfile>\Microsoft.Sdc.Tasks\MainTempGDN\Install

This folder contains everything you need to get started (apart from the docs :-)). Copy everything in this folder to your .NET framework folder (the v2.0.40607 one). You might experience the same 'overlap' problem I explained above, but that can be solved easy :-).

You can find a sample build file that uses some of the SDC tasks (mostly file & folder mgmt) here.

Next time, I'll talk about how to create a custom task yourself, and how to port a Nant or NantContrib task to MSBuild. I needed it because I couldn't get the source control tasks in the SDC build to work, so I ported the Nant VSS tasks.