Msbuild copy pdf files

This list is expected to be a one-to-one mapping with the list specified in the SourceFiles parameter. That is, the first file specified in SourceFiles will be copied to the first location specified in DestinationFiles , and so forth.

Optional ITaskItem parameter. Specifies the directory to which you want to copy the files. This must be a directory, not a file.

If the directory does not exist, it is created automatically. Optional Boolean parameter. Overwrite files even if they are marked as read only files. Optional Int32 parameter. Specifies how many times to attempt to copy, if all previous attempts have failed. Defaults to zero. Caution: The use of retries can mask a synchronization problem in your build process. Specifies the delay between any necessary retries. Visual Studio isn't installed. You want to run a build in multiple processes.

You want to modify the build system. For example, you might want to enable the following actions:. Do a post-processing step.

For example, you might want to stamp an assembly with a different version. As another alternative, you can build code in the IDE on a development computer but run MSBuild from the command line to build code that's integrated from multiple developers. You can also use the. NET Core projects. You can use Azure Pipelines to automatically compile, test, and deploy your application. Your build system can automatically run builds when developers check in code for example, as part of a Continuous Integration strategy or according to a schedule for example, a nightly Build Verification Test build.

Azure Pipelines compiles your code by using MSBuild. For more information, see Azure Pipelines. This article provides an overview of MSBuild. Command-line options let you set properties, execute specific targets, and set other options that control the build process.

For example, you would use the following command-line syntax to build the file MyProj. For more information about MSBuild command-line options, see Command-line reference. The MSBuild project file format lets developers describe the items that are to be built, and also how they are to be built for different operating systems and configurations. In addition, the project file format lets developers author reusable build rules that can be factored into separate files so that builds can be performed consistently across different projects in the product.

The Visual Studio build system stores project-specific logic in the your project file itself, and uses imported MSBuild XML files with extensions like. These imports are sometimes visible in the Visual Studio project file, but in newer projects such as. NET Core,. NET 5 and. These are called SDK-style projects. When you reference an SDK such as the. The following sections describe some of the basic elements of the MSBuild project file format. For a tutorial about how to create a basic project file, see Walkthrough: Creating an MSBuild project file from scratch.

Properties are declared by creating an element that has the name of the property as a child of a PropertyGroup element. For example, the following code creates a property named BuildDir that has a value of Build. You can define a property conditionally by placing a Condition attribute in the element.

The contents of conditional elements are ignored unless the condition evaluates to true. In the following example, the Configuration element is defined if it hasn't yet been defined.

For more information about properties, see MSBuild properties. Items are inputs into the build system and typically represent files. Items are grouped into item types based on user-defined item names. These item types can be used as parameters for tasks, which use the individual items to perform the steps of the build process.

Items are declared in the project file by creating an element that has the name of the item type as a child of an ItemGroup element. The last new addition is the condition attribute on the release target. This condition examines if the value of the Configuration property is Release and only allows execution of the Release target if this condition is true. CallTarget — Executes another target inside the current build file. Used where a target needs to call another target at a specific place inside the target itself.

If the target were just dependant on the other target being executed, we would use the DependsOnTargets attribute instead.

Exec — Executes an external process. This is typically used to executed external tools, which did not implement MSBuild targets themself. It is possible to write your own MSBuild tasks.

This can be extremely useful if you want to integrate some of your own tools with MSBuild or if you need to do stuff which is not yet supported by MSBuild. The following example shows how to write a simple addition task:. I defined two properties which act as input variables to the addition task: Number1 and Number2. Both properties are marked with the Required attribute which tells the script to fail if they are not specified.

An output property is added as well. The value of this property will be available within the build script. The name of the task as well as the assembly name is specified. The Addition target uses the AddTask with the two Number properties as attributes. The Output element copies the result of the task to a property called CalculatedSum.

This property is accessible in the Message task for output on the console. Once in a while a question pops up in different forums: How do I parameterize a common part of my script, making it possible to use it from different targets? This is a great question. MSBuild provides the CallTarget task, which executes another target inside the current build file. In the example we define two targets: Target1 and Target2. You will probably notice that the targets look very similar.

The only difference is the text inside the Message task. This is a simple example of the problem and of course changing the text in both message tasks would be fairly simple.

First of all we need to move the common tasks to a new target:. Note that the replaced part of the Text with the X. Now we need to call this target, making sure that X will be replaced with the correct string.

For this purpose we use another task called MSBuild. The great thing about the MSBuild task is that it has the capability to receive properties. In order to call our PrintMessage target and print the correct string, we parameterize the target like this:. What we do here is that we call the PrintMessage task on this. The properties attribute specify a single property named Caller. Multiple properties can be specified inside this attribute by separating them with a semicolon.

In the PrintMessage task we simply print the message with the Caller property specified inside the Text attribute. Before property functions, some of the most simple tasks to execute in. Allow me to explain the basics of property functions through an example.

The purpose of the example MSBuild script is to write the current date and time to the console. Admitted not the most advanced script, but it serves our purpose of explaining property functions just fine. In the old days before 4. With property functions doing things like this is almost as easy as in. The script can be implemented using property functions as this:. Notice that no external tasks are imported to write this script.

Instead of including a property name inside the parethesis, I use one of the build-in System types available through.