A new MSBuild editing experience
MSBuild is a fundamental part of the .NET development experience, but it can be challenging to new and experienced developers alike. To help developers better understand their project files and access advanced functionality that requires editing the project file directly, we’re releasing an experimental MSBuild editor that has a much richer understanding of MSBuild files than the current XML schema allows. Based on feedback, we hope to make it available by default to all .NET developers. If you work with MSBuild files at all, please try it and let us know how it goes.
Although Visual Studio provides a rich UI for managing your project and its settings, you may need to edit your csproj file directly to access certain advanced features that are not exposed in the UI. You may also need to edit csproj files directly when merging changes from source control, or you may be writing targets and props files for local use or for publishing in a NuGet package. If any of these scenarios apply to you, we’d like your feedback on the new experience.
The new MSBuild editor provides Quick Info not just for XML elements in MSBuild files, but also for properties, items and metadata in MSBuild expressions. The Quick Info popup is richer, and has deep links to relevant documentation, as well as hyperlinks to references in other files that may help you understand how that property or item is used by the underlying targets.
