VisualStudio Targets

Contains MSBuild targets that are useful when developing Visual Studio extensions.

• Provides the following MSBuild properties for version-aware projects:

  • VisualStudioVersion: ensures it's always set (i.e. under dev15+, sets it to '15.0' on command line builds
  • MinimumVisualStudioVersion: equals VisualStudioVersion to allow opening on any version
  • DevEnvDir: if it's empty, for safe command-line building. Can be overriden.
  • PublicAssemblies: $(DevEnvDir)\PublicAssemblies\
  • PrivateAssemblies: $(DevEnvDir)\PrivateAssemblies\
  • VSSDK: the [VSSDK install directory]\VisualStudioIntegration\Common\Assemblies\ folder. Can be overriden.
  • VSSDK20: $(VSSDK)v2.0\
  • VSSDK40: $(VSSDK)v4.0\
  • VSToolsPath: path to the MSBuild targets for the VSSDK
  • Dev: simple version number from Visual Studio version, without the decimal (i.e. '15')
  • DEV[n] defined constant for conditional code compilation (i.e. #if DEV15, to compile only when building for VS2017). Gets n from $(Dev) value.

• Smarter and simpler template authoring. Just set BuildAction to None on all your template content as well as the .vstemplate, and they become Smart Templates automatically:

  • Supports metadata to add shared artifacts to the generated ZIP files
  • Does not regenerate ZIP files if content didn't change
  • Supports linked files that are copied to the output directory

More in-depth tutorials on using this project is available in the wiki.

See the readme for the latest change log.

Installation

To install Clarius Visual Studio Targets, run the following command in the Package Manager Console:

PM> Install-Package Clarius.VisualStudio

Icon Infinity by Cengiz SARI from The Noun Project.

This project is sponsored by Clarius Labs