Even though MSBuild comes with 40 or so built-in tasks it lacks many essential features which, thanks to community, are available from three major extension projects:
- MSBuild Extension Pack – actively maintained, this extension provides over 280 tasks
- MSBuild Community Tasks Project – not maintained since 2007, this set of ~90 tasks still has a few unique tasks, namely the flat-file-based Version task
- SDC Tasks Library – not maintained since Aug 2008, this extension have been absorbed into MSBuild Extension Pack. If there’s something you can’t find in MSBuild Extension Pack, check this one out, with its portfolio of 300+ tasks chances are, it may have what you need.
Examples of problems one can solve with the help of extension tasks:
- FTP upload/download
- Working with Subversion and (god forbid) SourceSafe repositories
- Running NUnit tests
- Generating AssemblyInfo files
- Auto-incrementing Build numbers, Version numbers, etc
- Build CHM documentation
- Execute SQL
- Perform find and replace operations on files
- Send alerts by email or Twitter
