Inside the Microsoft Build Engine: Using MSBuild and Team Foundation Build

I'm a developer on MSBuild; Sayed wrote this book with our encouragement, and we reviewed it for accuracy and completeness, so I can recommend it. The documentation for MSBuild in 2.0 and 3.5 was not great; I consider this something like the missing manual. Unfortunately there aren't many other MSBuild books; fortunately Sayed did a good job on this one. We're fixing a lot of what's "missing" in MSBuild in the upcoming version 4.0 -- I hope Sayed can do a 2nd edition when that comes out. Plus, our docs should be better then :-) Dan

This book is outstanding. A literal step-by-step walk through of MSBuild and Team Build. I have been working with these products for almost a year and learned them on my own, via various websites, blogs, msdn walk-throughs, etc. There are a myriad of sources with bits and pieces of the information you need, and I feel this book pulls them all together in one very well written book. This is the best source to get going from beginner to intermediate level with MSBuild and Team Build. Obviously you need to dive into the products and get your feet wet intensely to gain expert knowledge of the two. However, this book takes you leaps and bounds into an advanced level of knowledge. The msdn topics have everything else you need as a reference beyond this book. I highly recommend this book to anyone who is both new or experienced with MSBuild or Team Build. Great work!

I've been working with MSBuild now for about a year and have learnt it solely from other people feeding me strips of information here and there. Recently I have been working on an enterprise project that requires the utmost attention concerning automated builds. I searched for anything on MSBuild and came across this gem. Even though I have decent experience in MSBuild I read this book from front to back twice over and was exceptionally impressed with how this book was put together. The examples were very straight forward and understandable even to a few of my friends who have no idea about MSBuild. I feel that so long as the reader has an understanding of XML, then they can understand the examples in this book. The chapter 1 quick starts are greating for getting straight into the basics and getting a great feel for the direction the books takes you in. There is some fantastic advice and guidance for customizing MSBuilds, batch building and incremental building and there are 3 chapters dedicated to Team Foundation Build which were highly educational for me in not only a gathering a better understanding of the build process in Team Foundation but also a stronger understanding of how to utilize Build Agents, retention policies, triggers, and unit testing within Team Foundation Build. This book quite simply in my humble opinion, is a "must have" for anybody that is serious in learning the art of build mastering and is a "must have" for build masters as an A+ reference. Kudos to Sayed and William for writing this much needed gem. Well done.

This is a well written book on the MSBuild system. I was working on an open source project that will generate the MSBuild scripts and wanted to understand it well enough to take maximum advantage of it. This book is all that I was waiting for, it is worth the price. The explanations are simply and very clear - easy to understand language. There are few mistakes, but you can easily tell. After reading the Quick Start (Chapter 1), you know you are in very good hands. The book can be used by any user of the Visual Studio or .NET Framework 2.x or later, and unlike many out there, it does not attempt to teach you how to install VS.NET or how to use it. My only wish is that the complete definition of each tag is presented the first time it is introduced, so that you know at least all its attributes, without having to refer to the Appendix or other resources.