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Building Testing and Debugging on .Net Core MSBuild

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Sarabeth-Jaffe-Microsoft edited this page Sep 2, 2016 · 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##

RebuildWithLocalMSBuild.cmd: This script uses a .NET core hosted MSBuild to target .NET Core and run the tests.

##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## Clone the xplat branch:

git clone [email protected]:Microsoft/msbuild.git --branch xplat

Navigate to the clone's working directory and run your chosen build script:

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

Default arguments lead to a Mono hosted MSBuild targeting CoreCLR: ./cibuild.sh

##Debugging## To get a clearer idea of what's going on in your build, check out MSBuildStructuredLog. MSBuildStructuredLog is a logger for MSBuild that records and visualizes a structured representation of executed targets, tasks, properties, and item values.

More debugging tools listed here.

##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

Unofficial: Getting .Net Core MSBuild binaries without building the code

This is a non-ideal, intermediary solution for getting .NET core MSBuild binaries. We plan on improving this experience.

git clone https://github.com/Microsoft/msbuild.git
cd msbuild
git fetch --all
git checkout origin/xplat
init-tools.cmd # windows
./init-tools.sh # unix

./Tools/dotnetcli/dotnet ./Tools/MSBuild.exe /path/to/project
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