Tim Van Wassenhove

A while ago i blogged that i was using the TemplateFile task from the MSBuild Community Tasks Project to generate configuration files. Each project that required templating would have modified it’s csproj file as following:

<!-- To modify your build process, add your task inside one of the targets below and uncomment it.
Other similar extension points exist, see Microsoft.Common.targets. -->
<import Project="$(MSBuildProjectDirectory)\config.msbuild" />
<target Name="BeforeBuild">
 <callTarget Targets="GenerateConfigurationFiles" />
</target>

And each of these config.msbuild files looked as following:

<templateFile Template="web.template.config" OutputFileName="web.config" Tokens="@(TemplateTokens)" />
<templateFile Template="Config\WcfClients.config" OutputFileName="Config\WcfClients.config" Tokens="@(TemplateTokens)" />
</target>

As you can notice the convention here is that each template file has ‘.template.’ in it’s name, and the name of an output file is the template file name without ‘.template.’.

 <!-- valide input -->
 <error Condition="'$(SourceFile)'==''" Text="Missing SourceFile" />
 <!-- calculate destination file -->
 <regexReplace Input="$(SourceFile)" Expression="(\.template)\." Replacement="." Count="1">
  <output TaskParameter="Output" PropertyName="DestinationFile" />
 </regexReplace>
 <!-- generate file -->
 <templateFile Template="$(SourceFile)" OutputFileName="$(DestinationFile)" Tokens="@(TemplateTokens)" />
</target>

Now that we can do it for one file, we can do it for many files too:

 <!-- valide input -->
 <error Condition="'$(SourceDir)'==''" Text="Missing SourceDir" />
 <!-- find all template files -->
 <itemGroup>
  <templateFiles Include="$(SourceDir)\**\*.template.*" Exlude="$(SourceDir)\**\*.svn*" />
 </itemGroup>
 <!-- process each template file -->
 <msbuild Projects="$(MSBuildProjectFile)" Targets="ProcessTemplate" Properties="SourceFile=%(TemplateFiles.FullPath)" />
</target>

After these core improvements we wrote a common.proj.targets file as following:

 <!-- import global variables -->
 <import Project="$(MSBuildThisFileDirectory)\configuration.proj" />

 <propertyGroup>
  <buildDependsOn>CommonBeforeBuild;$(BuildDependsOn);CommonAfterBuild</buildDependsOn>
 </propertyGroup>

 <target Name="CommonBeforeBuild">
  <msbuild Projects="$(CommonTargetsPath)" Targets="ProcessTemplates" Properties="SourceDir=$(MSBuildProjectDirectory)" />
 </target>

 <target Name="CommonAfterBuild">
  <!--<msbuild Projects="$(CommonBuildTargetsPath)" Targets="PEVerify" Properties="SourceFile=$(TargetPath)" />-->
 </target>
</project>

Now we only need to import our common.proj.targets file in projects that have template files and focus on real business problems