MSBuild Trickery: 99 Ways to Bend the Build Engine to Your Will

This book was super helpful. You will learn a lot which you can then use even if you're not using the exact coding language in the book. I use Python, and I was able to replicate some of the tips.

(Disclaimer - I did the technical review of this book, and wrote the foreword.)There are only two substantial MSBuild books available, this one and one from Microsoft Press. Fortunately they are both solid books. They also complement each other well. The Microsoft Press book is aimed at the beginner to intermediate user, and this Trickery book, although it skims through the basics, is suitable for the intermediate to advanced user. If MSBuild is a major part of your job, I recommend that you purchase both.I like that this Trickery book is organized like a recipe book - you can look something up in the index and quickly get useful information about it. It explains how to do almost anything with the MSBuild syntax, covering all the features in the latest 4.0 version. It also has plenty of meaty guidance about structuring larger scale build processes and diagnosing performance problems.All in all a great guide, and as I mentioned in the Foreword, although I wrote substantial parts of MSBuild, even I learned some useful tricks from it. Highly recommended.Dan - developer lead, Project and Build, Visual Studio