Create Custom VS2012 Solutions Using MSBuild or F# Script or Anything?

Question

I have a library which includes samples of how to use the library along with unit tests.

I'm trying to create custom VS2012 solutions that will be in the deployment.

Depending on input given when initiating the deployment, I want to be able to create a solution - e.g. Samples.sln - which includes projects specified in the input file.

Example:

//inputfile1.txt
ProjectA    
ProjectB

I run an MSBuild xml file or an F# script (or anything that can do this) and I get a Samples directory with a Samples.sln containing ProjectA, ProjectA.Tests, ProjectB, ProjectB.Tests

A similar thing would happen if I gave an input file with ProjectX & Project7... etc.

With MSBuild, I've figured out how to read the file input, copy project folders to a new folder, and do some other things I would need for this whole process but I can't figure out how to create and customize a solution. I'm not sure this is even possible with MSBuild - I think I can only alter an already existing solution (but I've had trouble doing this as well).

I figure I have these options:

A. Add all projects to a Samples solution, then use msbuild to turn them on or off
or
B. There exists some other way (not using msbuild) to do this whole process

Is msbuild even capable of A?

Answer 1

You should understand that MsBuild mainly is a build platform. It also happens to be able to read and write file etc but that's not it's core business. So while you can generate solution files for it, it's going to be pretty hard using just MsBuild as it's simply not meant to be able to do things like that directly.

Here's an option C: if you open an sln in the text editor you'll see the structure is quite straigtforward: for every project there's a Project ... EndProject. You could generate these strings in the proper format (that is, genareate guid, figure out relative path to solution, get project name from path, ...) in an MsBuild target, put all of them in an ItemGroup then write it to a solution files using WriteLinesToFile. Perfectly possible, but a lot of work and I wouldn't recommend it.

For your option A, that's even harder: to include/exclude projects from a build, VisualStudio uses the .suo files and those are in some binary proprietary format which I have no idea how to generate.

That leaves you with option B which is basically option C but without reinventing the wheel: find a tool that can generate solution files for selected projets and have MsBuild invoke it useing Exec. There are probably a bunch of tools that can do this, but here's an example using the first usable one I found on the internet called SolutionMaker. Suppose your projects are in directory Foo, you'd use it like this:

<Exec Command="SolutionMaker /s Foo/foo.sln /p Foo /v 2012"/>

since the corresponding command line options are

/s <solution>: Solution file path
/p <path>: project root path
/v <fileVersion>: New solution file will be generated in the specified format.
   valid versions: 2008, 2010, 2012.