Microsoft Open-Sources MSBuild Engine

The latest open-sourcing at Microsoft is the opening up of MSBuild, the Microsoft Build Engine that serves as the build platform for .NET and Visual Studio.

Microsoft has decided to open up MSBuild on GitHub and make it available under the MIT license. MSBuild is described as, "The Microsoft Build Engine is a platform for building applications. This engine, which is also known as MSBuild, provides an XML schema for a project file that controls how the build platform processes and builds software. Visual Studio uses MSBuild, but it doesn't depend on Visual Studio. By invoking msbuild.exe on your project or solution file, you can orchestrate and build products in environments where Visual Studio isn't installed."

Though before Linux users get too excited, currently this software runs just on Windows and you need the Visual Studio 2015 Preview release to fully build it. Linux and OS X support for MSBuild is expected to be contributed by Microsoft "soon."

Those wishing to checkout MSBuild can find it on GitHub and learn more from the MSDN blog.