In a past life I was in charge of, among other things, the build systems and scripts for a large enterprise application, using and trying all of the standard choices available in the .NET world: Nant, Powershell, Cake, CruiseControl.NET and the good old Windows batch file. Since 2018 though I've been working on the .NET Project System team at Microsoft and now have a new perspective on things that I wish I had back then.

In this session I'm going to take you through how we layout our project files and associated build scripts to make things easy to manage and maintain, easy to spin up new projects, and perhaps most importantly we'll talk about the various tools and techniques to help diagnose issues in your builds should they arise. Most of the dotnet organization on GitHub follows these patterns, but even if they're not or you, hopefully learning about them will still give you one or two ideas you can apply to your projects today.

Sometimes "MSBuild" gets a bad rap, but whether you're using it directly, or using one of the alternatives I mentioned above, at the end of the day your project files are still MSBuild files and understanding a bit more about the thing you're using is never a bad thing.