MSBuild

I was reading up on MSBuild and found this very good article which explains how to write MSBuild files. A very good read. Its an excerpt from Deploying .NET Applications, by Sayed Y. Hashimi, Sayed Ibrahim Hashimi.

I also found two open source task collection for MSBuild. First one is called MSBuild Extension Pack. It is hosted at CodePlex which has about 300 tasks which includes BizTalk, SQL 2005, SQL 2008, TFS, Visual Studio and alot more.

The other one is hosted at Tigris called MSBuildTask. This has tasks for IIS, Javascript, SourceSafe, SVN, SQLServer.

Having so many tasks available during a build process is an excellent opportunity to automate pretty much the whole deployment process of development -> test -> production promotion strategy.

If you are looking to learn MSBuild, I would recommend to visit following:

• MSBuild By Example
• MSBuild at MSN
• Book - Deploying .Net Applications

Happy MSBuilding!

Dependency Injection using StructureMap

Found this very good video post from Rob Conery and Jeremy Miller. It explains setup of StructureMap (Dependency Injection) for Rob's StoreFront project. Very good explanation and easy to understand.

Great work guys!

Tips and tricks to rescue overdue projects

A very good Article by Omar Al Zabir, conversation style, explaining true practice of Agile/Scrum for projects. Must read this if you are or planning to use Agile Methodology.

Link: http://msmvps.com/blogs/omar/archive/2008/10/20/tips-and-tricks-to-rescue-overdue-projects.aspx

.NET IoC Container Comparisons

While looking for a comparison between so many Dependency Injection (IoC) frameworks available. Found this link which further points to a 2 article blog post. Good color coded comparison between some of the popular frameworks out there. Its missing MEF which I looked at today. Didn't get a chance to get more details on it but it seems pretty simple and easy to use.

Link: Part1
Link: Part2

Got the links from StackOverFlow post.