MSBuild 16.9.0

MSBuild 16.9.0

This version of MSBuild shipped with Visual Studio 2019 version 16.9.0 and .NET SDK 5.0.200.

What's new

• MSB3277 warnings now include information about the assembly identities involved, instead of saying to rerun under higher verbosity.
• It's now possible to opt out of culture-name detection of EmbeddedResources, for instance to have a resource named a.cs.template.
• Common targets now support $(BaseOutputPath), with the default value bin.
• Item Updates are no longer case-sensitive, fixing a regression in MSBuild 16.6 (#5888).
• ParentBuildEventContext now includes a parent MSBuild task if relevant, enabling proper nesting in GUI viewers.
• Builds that fail because a warning was elevated to an error now report overall failure in the MSBuild.exe exit code.

Detailed release notes

Added

• The MSB4006 error has been enhanced to describe the cycle when possible (#5711). Thanks, @haiyuzhu!.
• More information is logged under MSBUILDDEBUGCOMM (#5759).
• The command line parser now accepts arguments with double hyphens (--argument) as well as single hyphens (-argument) and forward slashes (/argument) (#5786). Thanks, @BartoszKlonowski!
• MSBuild now participates in the .NET CLI text performance log system on an opt-in basis (#5861).
• Common targets now support $(BaseOutputPath), with the default value bin (#5238). Thanks, @Nirmal4G!
• Microsoft.Build.Exceptions.CircularDependencyException is now public (#5988). Thanks, @tflynt91!
• EvaluationId is now preserved in the ProjectStarted event, allowing disambiguating related project start events (#5997). Thanks, @KirillOsenkov!
• The ResolveAssemblyReference task can now optionally emit items describing unresolved assembly conflicts (#5990).
• Experimental ProjectCache API to enable higher-order build systems (#5936).

Changed

• Warnings suppressed via $(NoWarn) (which formerly applied only to targets that opted in like the C# compiler) are now treated as $(MSBuildWarningsAsMessages) (#5671).
• Warnings elevated via $(WarningsAsErrors ) (which formerly applied only to targets that opted in like the C# compiler) are now treated as $(MSBuildWarningsAsErrors) (#5774).
• Improved error message when using an old .NET (Core) SDK and targeting .NET 5.0 (#5826).
• Trailing spaces in property expressions inside conditionals now emit an error instead of silently expanding to the empty string (#5672, #5868). Thanks, @mfkl!
• MSB3277 warnings now include information about the assembly identities involved, instead of saying to rerun under higher verbosity (#5798).
• MSB5009 errors now indicate the project in the solution that is causing the nesting error (#5835). Thanks, @BartoszKlonowski!
• Avoid spawning a process to determine processor architecture (#5897). Thanks, @tmds!
• It's now possible to opt out of culture-name detection of EmbeddedResources, for instance to have a resource named a.cs.template (#5824).
• ProjectInSolution.AbsolutePath returns a normalized full path when possible (#5949).
• Evaluation pass-stop events now include information about the "size" (number of properties/items/imports) of the project (#5978). Thanks, @arkalyanms!

Fixed

• AllowFailureWithoutError now does what it said it would do (#5743).
• The solution parser now no longer skips projects that are missing an EndProject line (#5808). Thanks, @BartoszKlonowski!
• ProjectReferences to .vcxproj projects from multi-targeted .NET projects no longer overbuild (#5838).
• Removed unused InternalsVisibleTo to obsolete test assemblies (#5914). Thanks, @SingleAccretion!
• Respect conditions when removing all items from an existing list at evaluation time (#5927).
• Common targets should no longer break if the environment variable OS is set (#5916).
• Some internal errors will now be reported as errors instead of hanging the build (#5917).
• Item Updates are no longer case-sensitive, fixing a regression in MSBuild 16.6 (#5888).
• Use lazy string formatting in more places (#5924).
• Redundant references to MSBuild assemblies no longer fail in 64 MSBuild inline tasks (#5975).
• The Exec task will now no longer emit the expanded Command to the log on failure (#5962). Thanks, @tmds!
• Tasks generated with RoslynCodeTaskFactory now no longer rebuild for every use, even with identical inputs (#5988). Thanks, @KirillOsenkov!
• ParentBuildEventContext now includes a parent MSBuild task if relevant (#5966). Thanks, @KirillOsenkov!
• Builds that fail because a warning was elevated to an error now report overall failure in the MSBuild.exe exit code (#6006).
• Performance of projects with large numbers of consecutive item updates without wildcards improved (#5853).
• Performance improvements in ResolveAssemblyReferences (#5973).
• PackageReferences that are marked as development dependencies are removed from the ClickOnce manifest (#6037).
• Stop overfiltering .NET Core assemblies from the ClickOnce manifest (#6080).

Infrastructure

• The MSBuild codebase now warns for unused using statements (#5761).
• The MSBuild codebase is now indexed for Rich Code Navigation on CI build (#5790). Thanks, @jepetty!
• The 64-bit bootstrap directory is more usable (#5825).
• Test robustness improvements (#5827, #5944, #5995).
• Make non-shipping NuGet packages compliant (#5823).
• Use Darc to keep bootstrap dependencies up to date (#5909).
• Replace MSBuild.Dev.sln and MSBuild.SourceBuild.sln with solution filters (#6010).
• Minimize and update NuGet feeds (#6019, #6136).

Documentation

• Improvements to MSBuild-internal Change Wave docs (#5770, #5851).
• High-level documentation for static graph functionality added (#5741).
• Instructions on testing private bits (#5818, #5831).
• XML doc comments updated to match public-ready API docs pages (#6028). Thanks, @ghogen!