Dotnet Build Tools

In the last five years, the dotnet build environment has grown so much. When I started as a C# developer a few years ago, all my builds were done by hand. Deploying an artifact meant to manually copy it onto the target machine. Since then I have improved my process step by step.

Abusing the Pre/Post Build Snippets

A csproj file can contain pre- and post-build snippets. I have used this feature to create an automated deployment when switching the build configuration from "Debug" to "Release". While this solution worked, I never felt at ease, as I could run these snippets on accident when testing something in Visual Studio.

Custom MSBuild Scripts

MSBuild is a fully fledged build tool, which supports custom actions and even comes with predefined commands to do various operations such as copying or archiving files. The major downside is that MSBuild scripts, similar to Ant scripts, are written in XML. While they work pretty fine, maintaining these scripts is a pain.

Psake

Several languages come with their own version of make. Psake is a build system written in PowerShell. We still need to call MSBuild to compile a C# solution, but we can leverage a pretty good shell to perform other tasks such as running a linter, or archiving artifacts.

Cake

Back when I found psake, the project did not have an active maintainer, which meant that at one point I could not use it with newer versions of MSBuild and Visual Studio. This lead me to Cake. Cake comes with a decent set of features and can get even better with all the available addins which extend the feature set even more. I even built my own addin for a version bumping CLI tool I used to develop. While the development was rather straightforward, I started to ask myself why if I am over-complicating things and why I don't just leverage CLI tools without any wrapper code.

Back to Psake

While switching most of my projects over from .NET Framework to .NET Core, I was surprised how terrific the dotnet CLI is. Instead of downloading nuget.exe to restore dependencies I can run dotnet restore. Instead of finding MSBuild (which depends on your version and edition of Visual Studio) to compile my code, I can run dotnet build. The CLI is the major reason why I switched back to psake.

A "typical" build script for my projects will now perform these tasks:

Run C# and PowerShell linters
Clean, restore and build the C# solution
Use dotnet publish to create binaries in a separate artifacts directory
Run unit, integration or end-to-end tests
Create and push Chocolatey packages