Last post on MSBuild for today, promised.
MSBuild supports something called Item. This is basically the same as a data-type with an id attribute in Ant. Its main use in MSBuild is to specify inputs and outputs of tasks and targets - in Ant the references are only used for task inputs.
While I don't like the inputs/outputs for Target too much, I think the idea to have a task accept a reference as input and provide its output as a reference is useful. For some tasks it may be difficult to calculate the output, if possible at all, but as a general concept this may work.
The input for tasks like <copy> could be some type of file-collection, as would be the output. Let's assume we want to copy some files and add those that we've just copied to an archive.
What we'd do with Ant now
<fileset id="templates" dir="styles">
<patternset id="template-patterns">
<include name="**/*.xsl"/>
</patternset>
</fileset>
<copy todir="${build}">
<fileset refid="templates"/>
</copy>
<zip destfile="files.zip">
<fileset dir="${build}">
<patternset refid="template-patterns"/>
</fileset>
</zip>
Let's assume all task can specify inputs (<copy> and <zip> would accept <fileset> among other things as inputs) and outputs via inputItems and outputItems attributes respectively. inputItems points to an existing project reference, outputItems creates such a reference.
Then we could write:
<fileset id="templates" dir="styles">
<include name="**/*.xsl"/>
</fileset>
<copy todir="${build}" inputItems="templates"
outputItems="copy-of-templates"/>
<zip destfile="files.zip" inputItems="copy-of-templates"/>
We could even create a special TaskContainer that magically connected the output of task n to the input of task n+1, avoiding temporary references like "copy-of-templates":
<fileset id="templates" dir="styles">
<include name="**/*.xsl"/>
</fileset>
<pipe>
<copy todir="${build}" inputItems="templates"/>
<zip destfile="files.zip"/>
</pipe>
Something that needs more thought, of course.
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