As I mentioned last week, I have been using MSBuild for some time now to build and deploy complex data warehousing applications. Many parts of this project involve Visual FoxPro. I wrote that I had not yet experimented doing builds with VFP using MSBuild. Alan Stevens quickly pointed me towards his CodePlex project “VfpMsBuildTarget” (aka:VFPBuild).

The goals of the project are simple:

1. Provide a GUI for including projects/files in a scheduled build, and set their appropriate properties
2. Create a VFP build target to be used by the MSBuild engine, the build system found in Visual Studio.

While the first goal might be a ways off, the second is close to being complete.

I had a chance to look at this project, test it, debug it a little, and compile a short list of improvements I would like to see (or add myself through CodePlex). The bugs were minor and easy to fix, and my list of improvements is pretty short. It should be noted that the body of work gone into this Task already is excellent. With little effort, I was able to get it going. And with a little more effort, it can be used in production. Note: Before you can have a go at it, you will need to compile vfpprojectbuilder.dll in VFP and VfpBuild.dll in C#.

Documentation

We’ll need some documentation. Alan knows this (and has promised some soon). Even without though, I made it through with little problem. I think I am at an advantage because I (a) know VFP well, (b) know C# well, and (c) know MSBuild well. We would need instructions on how to compile the dlls as well as how to construct the MSBuild XML. If you’re new to MSBuild, you might struggle with setting up the xml. For a simple test, here is a sample screenshot. I would have provided the code but the XML would have been eaten alive by the browser:

To execute the above, your cmd would look similar to the following:

C:>msbuild projectx.msbuild

Functionality

It doesn’t seem to be too much effort to add support for lRebuildAll, lShowErrors, and lBuildNewGUIDs of the project.build() method. Other than that, it gives you the ability to set build options and to specify a project to load.

From Here

I would like to see goal #2 of this project buttoned up soon. I have a production environment (actually, a few) that could really utilize a stable assembly like this. The build I downloaded was a bit buggy (there were references to class properties that did not exist, for example this.nLevel and this.nBuildAction). Fixing these, plus some enhanced bullet-proofing (defensive coding) and documentation would get us there I believe.

I’ll post more as I go. For now, you can get the active VFPMSBuildTarget project files here.

Tags: Codeplex, MSBuild, VFP, VFPBuild, Visual Studio