Azure DevOps, Scrum, & .NET Software Leadership and Consulting Services

Free course! Predicting the Future, Estimating, and Running Your Projects with Flow Metrics

How to run an MSBuild “Desktop Build” without running tests.


I’ve been playing around with doing “desktop builds” with MSBuild.  A “desktop build” is where you’d take the build script that describes a Team Foundation Server Team Build and run it on your local machine instead of through the TFS Build Server. 


There’s a page on the MSDN site that tells you how to do this and gives you some suggestions for common command-line options for MSBuild.  One of them is running your team build script without running the unit tests.  The syntax they provide is “msbuild TfsBuild.proj /t:RunTest=false“. 


I tried it and got the following error:



Build FAILED.
C:codeTeamBuildTypesMyProjectTFSBuild.proj : error MSB4057: The target “RunTest=false” does not exist in the project.
0 Warning(s)
1 Error(s)


There’s a bug in the documentation.  It should say “msbuild TfsBuild.proj /p:RunTest=false“ — /p instead of /t.

-Ben

SUBSCRIBE TO THE BLOG


Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.