MSBuild can be successfully built on Windows, OS X 10.13, Ubuntu 14.04, and Ubuntu 16.04.
build.cmd -msbuildEngine dotnet
Install the latest .NET Core SDK from http://dot.net/core. That will ensure all prerequisites for our build are met.
- OpenSSL: MSBuild uses the .Net CLI 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 saysUnable to load DLL 'System.Security.Cryptography.Native',dotnetmay be looking in the wrong place for the library.
./build.sh
If you encounter errors, see Something's wrong in my build
./build.sh --test
The best way to get .NET Core MSBuild is by installing the .NET Core SDK, which redistributes us. This will get you the latest released version of MSBuild for .NET Core. After installing it, you can use MSBuild through dotnet build or by manual invocation of the MSBuild.dll in the dotnet distribution.
Set the environment variable MSBUILDDEBUGONSTART to 2, then attach a debugger to the process manually after it starts.
To build projects using the MSBuild binaries from the repository, you first need to do a build (command: build.cmd /p:CreateBootstrap=true) which produces a bootstrap directory mimicking a Visual Studio (full framework flavor) or dotnet CLI (.net core flavor) installation.
Now, just point dotnet ./artifacts/bin/bootstrap/netcoreapp2.1/MSBuild/MSBuild.dll at a project file.
Alternatively, if you want to test the msbuild binaries in a more realistic environment, you can overwrite the dotnet CLI msbuild binaries (found under a path like ~/dotnet/sdk/3.0.100-alpha1-009428/) with the msbuild binaries from the above bootstrap directory. You might have to kill existing dotnet processes before doing this. Then, (using the previous dotnet example directory) just point ~/dotnet/dotnet build at a project file.