Inside the Microsoft® Build Engine: Using MSBuild and Team Foundation Build

Items

When software is being built, files and directories are used heavily. Because of the usage and importance of files and directories, MSBuild has a specific construct to support these. This construct is items. In the previous section we covered properties. As stated previously, in programming terms properties can be considered a regular scalar variable. This is because a property has a unique name and a single value. An item can be thought of as an array. This is because an item has a single name but can have multiple values. Properties use the PropertyGroup to declare properties; similarly, items use an ItemGroup element. Take a look at the following very simple example from Items01.proj.

<Project xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/developer/msbuild/2003"> ...