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Building Testing and Debugging on .Net Core MSBuild

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Rainer Sigwald edited this page Jan 12, 2017 · 23 revisions

These instructions refer to working with the xplat branch.

MSBuild can be successfully built on Windows, OS X 10.11, and Ubuntu 14.04. Newer versions of Ubuntu may work, but .NET Core development is currently aimed at 14.04.

Windows

##Build process##

cibuild.cmd --target CoreCLR

##Debugging##

For debugging tests, use the /d switch for CoreRun.exe. This prompts the core CLR to wait for a debugger to attach. You can attach using Visual Studio.

Unix

Required packages for OSX & Ubuntu

  • OpenSSL: MSBuild uses the .Net CLI to download Nuget packages during its build process. The CLI requires a recent OpenSSL library available in /usr/lib. This can be downloaded using brew on OS X (brew install openssl) and apt-get (apt-get install openssl) on Ubuntu, or building from source. If you use a different package manager and see an error that says Unable to load DLL 'System.Security.Cryptography.Native', dotnet may be looking in the wrong place for the library.

  • Mono when doing a Mono-hosted version of MSBuild

Required packages for Ubuntu

  • libunwind is required by .NET Core. Install it using sudo apt-get install libunwind8

##Build process##

Targeting .Net Core: ./cibuild.sh --target CoreCLR

Targeting Mono: ./cibuild.sh --target Mono

Using a .NET core MSBuild host: ./cibuild.sh --host CoreCLR

Using a Mono MSBuild host: ./cibuild --host Mono

##Tests##

Tests are currently disabled on platforms other than Windows. If you'd like to run them, explicitly opt in with

./cibuild.sh --scope Test

Getting .Net Core MSBuild binaries without building the code

The best way to get .NET Core MSBuild is through the dotnet CLI, which redistributes us. It's not always the very very latest but they take regular drops. After installing it, you can use MSBuild through dotnet build or by manual invocation of the MSBuild.dll in the dotnet distribution.

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