MSBuild tips: some things you shouldn’t do, and what to do instead.
Victor Sergienko
Tags
-
Couple of words
-
Recent Posts
Meta
Category Archives: Main
MSBuild don’ts
15-Apr-08Another problem with MSBuild bootstrappers that can screw all your installation… If scheduling reboot after installing .NET or other prerequisites, bootstrapper copies itself to run from TEMP on boot. Why not staying where it is – who knows. And definitely, all the other MSIs are not copied, so it won’t find them. Reproduced for me. [...]
Can’t run .NET bootstrapper from an MSI
02-Apr-08Now I know it. It’s Windows Installer error 1618 that I didn’t see somewhy when attempting to fix .NET bootstrapper. Either I was inattentive or it wasn’t there: “Another copy of msiexec is running”. You can’t have two Windows Installers running, at least if one of them installs .NET. Information is from this maillist post. [...]
After Microsoft didn’t include .NET 3.5 in any current release of Windows (read “Vista service pack 1″), some of us developers who believed in long-ago C# 3.0 ads, had to roll back to .NET 3.0 and C# 2.0. Including me. Not mentioning pain of rolling back all LINQ tasties in code and debugging our replacements [...]
C++ static code checker
26-Mar-08Did you ever try parsing C++? What about parsing for every combination of possible define-s at once? Microsoft has a static code checker tools for C++, like FxCop for .NET. That’s awfully complex task, you now see. In .NET you can analyze bytecode, and luckily don’t really need to account for conditional compilation. In C++ [...]
Some pages that somewhy didn’t appear at top of Google searches for WiX help. WiXWiki.com – pretty useful and contains some snippets you won’t find in WiX manual or tutorial. Many of rare code snippets WiX development releases; some broken (last two broken in VS 2008), some contain the very things you’ll need; Justin Rockwood’s [...]
NAnt vs MSBuild funnies
20-Mar-08All the software is equally bad… Well, I know some pieces of software that are good, but I won’t mention them today. One of our msbuild vs nant choice criteria is a product versioning support. Sad or funny things are: both don’t include sane tool out of box; both need installing NAntContrib or MSBuild Community [...]
Auto-update with WiX
12-Mar-08Update: for a ready solution (library), see official release announcement Windows Installer on itself is a pain. WiX saves you from it, mostly wrapping the complexity into XML constructs understandable to non-gurus. Well, not completely – you still have to know: why the heck shortcut didn’t appear in start menu; how to create a web [...]
Choosing MSBuild/TeamBuild vs NAnt
11-Mar-08We’re choosing a build tool for VS 2008 project. I’m not expert in any, only had put together a couple of NAnt scripts. So I give no objective technical information in this post, just impressions. First discussion of this choice, back in 2005, is almost strictly in favor of NAnt. Though, read it to know [...]
Till now, I did understand but didn’t remember the very situation, as I wasn’t the one creating thread pools and alike: all the core things were already there. It’s a blessing to work for start-up. You can think about Monitor.Wait(toRetrieve); // will throw SynchronizationLockException Now, after a look into docs, I see that one needs [...]
Multithreading in WPF: getting started
12-Feb-08Couple of things to know when starting a new thread in WPF application
When do you start coding?
30-Jan-08I prefer first to identify program classes, then to think some time about its design, the longer the better. Then, to prove my internal API idea, I make up code pieces by “wishful thinking”: how I wish the code to look, for it to be the most brief and to express core system objects and [...]