We are creating a WPF application on Visual Studio 2010 (beta 1), but Blend 3 doesn’t load .NET Framework 4.0 assemblies. So on the designer’s machine we had to compile the solution targeting .NET Framework version 3.5.
(quick thought: our development team is made up of one designer, one product manager, and one project manager. So, WHO IS CODING???)
We found an article on MSBuild – Microsoft’s build engine – about the /toolsversion option, that targets specific .NET Framework versions. We built a .bat file that recompiles all projects in the solution. Following is some of it:
msbuild StorageClient\StorageClient.csproj /toolsversion:3.5 /verbosity:quiet
if ERRORLEVEL 1 goto erro
MSBuild recognizes Visual Studio project files, and activates the corresponding compiler. The /toolsversion option selects the target .NET Framework version (allowed values are 2.0, 3.0, 3.5 and 4.0), and overrides the selected version on the project file. The following “if” checks if MSBuild returned 1, which signals an error, so you can stop the build job (using good(?) old goto).
A lot less painful than I thought. The same batch will be used to generate a 3.5 version of the solution when building the tables on Azure Development Storage, because DevTableGen – the utility that builds the tables – also does not support 4.0 .NET Framework assemblies.
MSBuild location is not included on the standard command prompt path, so use Visual Studio 2010 command prompt (VS 2010 program group > Visual Studio 2010 Tools).
