CODEWITHSUNDEEP
xmlmsbuildvisual-studio-2019
Pavel Stepanek
Pavel Stepanek

Reputation: 305

The order of MSBuild build Events in Visual Studio 2019

According to this Microsoft's documentation, for each project in a Visual Studio 2019 solution, build events run in the following order with other build steps (including custom build steps and tools):

The custom build step on the project and a post-build event run sequentially after all other build processes finish.

However, when the WDK v10.0.19041.0 is installed, the StampInf and InfVerif are executed before the Pre-Build Event.

This is evidenced by the following Microsoft's code:

<Target Name="StampInf"
          Condition="'@(Inf)' != ''"
          BeforeTargets="InfVerif">

...

<Target Name="InfVerif"
          Condition="'@(Inf)' != '' and '$(IsDriverAppToolset)' != 'true'"
          AfterTargets="StampInf"
          BeforeTargets="PreBuildEvent">

The Microsoft's code above is excerpted from:
C:\Program Files (x86)\Windows Kits\10\build\WindowsDriver.Common.targets

Notice, how the AfterTargets and BeforeTargets directives establish the order of execution of StampInf, InfVerify and PreBuildEvent.

Question 1: Is the execution of StampInf and InfVerify before the Pre-Build Event a bug in implementation or an error in Microsoft's documentation ?
Question 2: How to execute a custom command before InfVerif in a portable manner (without modifying Microsoft's source files of the Visual Studio or the WDK) ?

Upvotes: 1

Views: 849

Answers (1)

Jonathan Dodds
Jonathan Dodds

Reputation: 5143

Seems like a bug that InfVerif is implemented to explicitly reference being before the PreBuildEvent target. The WDK shouldn't be interfering with the semantics of PreBuildEvent.

However, MSBuild will ignore a reference to a target that doesn't exist in the current project. You can set your target to be BeforeTargets="PreBuildEvent;InfVerif;StampInf" and for projects that don't have an InfVerif or StampInf target there should not be an error. You don't need to modify Microsoft's MSBuild code to get around this issue.

Upvotes: 2

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