Building C# solutions from command line with Visual Studio 2010

Question

I want to automate the build process for my C# solutions. How can I build C# solutions from the command line so that I don't have to deal with dependencies manually?

Solution 1

if you open a visual studio command prompt from your start menu - then you can call MSBuild and give that either the .sln file or a specific .csproj file in order to build what you need

alternatively you can create a custom MSBuild file that takes care of the tasks.

one tip: make sure the version of MSBuild that you use is applicable to the target framework or tools version of the project

i.e. if you try and build a solution that was created in vs2010 with msbuild 3.5 then it will not recognise the 4.0 toolset of the project

Solution 2

For solutions you can use:

devenv /build Release Solution.sln

or

devenv /build Debug Solution.sln

Solution 3

Visual Studio project and solution files are also MSBuild build files.

You can simply run MSBuild against the solution/project file and it will build:

<path to>msbuild.exe <path to>solution/project file

Solution 4

msbuild YourSolution.sln

Solution 5

Personally I'm a huge fan of Rake (yeah - I heard you when you said your c# solution)

Check it out: http://www.lostechies.com/blogs/derickbailey/archive/2009/09/23/albacore-a-suite-of-rake-build-tasks-for-net-solutions.aspx

Have fun - it made life a lot better for me!

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Comments

[IDIR Samir]

I think csc.exe only works on .cs files but not on .sln files

[Jay Walker]

This requires Visual Studio to be installed on the machine executing the build. msbuild is available with .net framework.

[Admin]

I had to execute vcvarsall.bat before I could get msbuild to run from any old cli instance, once I did that it works like a charm!

[huysentruitw]

+1. For an unknown reason, msbuild doesn't work on a brand new .sln file generated with qmake -recursive -tp vc my.sln. I had to open the solution with VS to get msbuild working. With devenv, I can automate the qmake and build process. Thanks

[kroiz]

You could instead open the "Developer Command Prompt": All Programs -> Microsoft Visual Studio -> Visual Studio Tools.

[Qwertie]

How does it know whether to do a Debug or Release build?

[Christian]

"msbuild /?" for command line arguments including debug/release

[Matt]

I tried this in a batch file, but had to put the line call "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2019\Enterprise\Common7\Tools\VsDevCmd.bat" on top of it. Then it worked. If you have a different edition of VS, you need to change the path to VsDevCmd.bat.

[Gulzar]

What if I want to specify output folder path?