Introduction                                                                                                               

The MSBuild Extension Pack provides a collection of over 230 tasks. A high level summary of what the tasks currently cover includes the following:

· System Items: Certificates, COM+, Console, Date and Time, Drives, Environment Variables, Event Logs, Files and Folders, GAC, Network, Performance Counters, Registry, Services, Sound

· Code: Assemblies, CAB Files, Code Signing, File Detokenisation, GUID’s, Mathematics, Strings, Threads, Xml, Zip Files

· Applications: BizTalk 2006, Email, IIS6, IIS7, MSBuild, SourceSafe, SQL Server 2005, SQL Server 2008, StyleCop, Team Foundation Server, Visual Basic 6, WMI

It implements a TaskAction based design which improves usability and maintenance whilst reducing the code base, e.g. to start or stop a website, typically two task files would be created to perform each task, whereas the MSBuild Extension Pack accomplishes this in a single task file using TaskAction=”Stop” and TaskAction=”Start”.

Each task is documented and provided with an example in the help file. Where applicable, tasks are remote enabled, simply specify a MachineName with optional credentials and the task will target the remote machine.

Each task is also provided with an IntelliSense schema file to improve developer productivity in the Visual Studio IDE.

Additional tasks and improvements to the documentation will be released frequently. Users are encouraged to make use of the Issues and Discussions features on CodePlex and to contribute code to help drive this project forward.

Direct feedback may be emailed to: feedback@msbuildextensionpack.com