Microsoft Inside the Build Engine: Using MSBuild and Team Foundation Build 406pages software manual

Inside the Microsoft Build Engine: Using MSBuild and Team Foundation Build As software complexity increases, proper build practices become ever more important. This essential reference drills inside MSBuild - and shows how to maximize your control over the build and deployment process. Learn how to customize and extend build processes with MSBuild - and scale them to the team, product, or enterprise level with Team Foundation Build.
The build process - when code gets assembled to see how and how well it works - is a critical step in software development. Developers had few options for customizing the build process before Visual Studio 2005 and Visual Studio 2008, but the Microsoft Build Engine (MSBuild) enables developers to customize each step during a build. MSBuild is extensible and uses an XML file to describe each step, allowing the build master or developer to easily change and augment how projects are built.
This book offers hands-on guidance for customizing MSBuild, and provides a cookbook of examples on Web deployment, automated releases, and other essential topics. It also covers Visual Studio Team Foundation Build, the build engine in Visual Studio Team System.