12.3 Building .NET 1.1 Assemblies in MSBuild with MSBee

Out of the box, Visual Studio 2005 supports only building applications that target .NET 2.0. While developers have been very excited about this release, many face a migration problem. Many vendors have customers who are using .NET 1.1 and aren’t ready to upgrade to .NET 2.0. And even if they do want to make the switch, most enterprise customers have considerable amounts of software built on .NET 1.1 and can’t do so overnight.

MSBee (MSBuild Extras – Toolkit for .NET 1.1) comes to the rescue, providing developers with the means to continue producing assemblies that run on .NET 1.1 while working in Visual Studio 2005.

MSBee is an addition to MSBuild that allows developers to build managed applications using Visual Studio 2005 projects that target .NET 1.1. MSBee can build C# and Visual Basic projects that generate resources, use COM references, create satellite assemblies, and rely on the license compiler.

MSBee is triggered on the MSBuild command line and is easy to use; in fact, you can build an entire managed solution that targets .NET 1.1 by simply setting two properties.

MSBee at a Glance

Tool

MSBee (MSBuild Extras – Toolkit for .NET 1.1)

Version covered

1.0

Home page

http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=62277

Power Tools page

http://www.windevpowertools.com/tools/51

Summary

Addition to MSBuild that allows developers to build managed ...

Get Windows Developer Power Tools now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.