A few days ago I received an email about an MSBuild visual editor! This was something that I was interested in doing a while ago, but never got around to doing it. This tool is called MSBuild Sidekick, and you can download it for free from http://www.attrice.info/msbuild/index.htm. I have downloaded it and played around with it. I think it’s a good tool for people who are getting started with MSBuild, but for those who use MSBuild on a regular basis I don’t think it can replace the productivity that is achieved with Intellisense. They have an interesting way of representing the build file visually, and after some time if the right extensions are added it may be a tool that I’d use over Visual Studio to edit my MSBuild files. One of the challenges of representing a build file is that you have to be aware of where your new declarations are being placed. For instance if you have two properties defined, lets say Property1 and Property2. If Property2 depends on Property1 then you have to make sure that it is declared after Property1. As far as I could tell there was no way to achieve this without viewing the source of the project file through the tool.

Sayed Ibrahim Hashimi