Skip to content

Create and ship AppHosts for MSBuild for the .NET distribution of MSBuild #12995

Description

@baronfel

Summary

We should enable MSBuild to be invoked directly as a native executable (MSBuild.exe / MSBuild) instead of through dotnet MSBuild.dll. This will provide

  • Better process identification (processes show as "MSBuild" not "dotnet")
  • Win32 manifest embedding support (COM interop)
    • critical for full support of the .NET TaskHost feature set
  • Consistency with Roslyn compilers (csc, vbc) which already use app hosts
  • Simplified invocation model
    • no more "if Framework then MSbuild.exe else dotnet.exe msbuild.dll"-style logic in the codebase

Background and Motivation

See #12857 for a full treatment of the motivation, but the gist is we'll be more understandable to users, we'll unblock key modernization features, and consuming MSBuild will get simpler overall.

Proposed Feature

See #12857 for a full treatment.

Alternative Designs

No response

Activity

Sign up for free to join this conversation on GitHub. Already have an account? Sign in to comment

Metadata

Metadata

Labels

No labels
No labels

Projects

No projects

    Milestone

    No milestone

    Relationships

    None yet

    Development

    No branches or pull requests

    Issue actions