I’ve build working a lot recently with MSBuild, specifically in relation to automating the build process for our companies products. In my case, our product is mostly .NET, with some VB6 projects still hanging around, and of course some database bits and InstallShield and DemoShield projects to wrap things up for a disc image. Pretty typical commercial product build process.

At any rate, I’ve been experimenting with an MSBuild project type that I could embed in my solution to control all this, not only from the IDE, but also automatically get hooked in with the TFSBuild process, when I really started needing a way to the the diagnostic logging level of the build process when MSBuild is run from within Visual Studio to perform the build.

Normally, VS runs MSBuild with a minimal logging level, so you really don’t see that much in the Visual Studio Output window. I wanted to alter that.

I’d been looking pretty fruitlessly until I came across Sara Ford’s blog here. Turns out, there’s an option in Visual Studio’s Options Window to do just this! It’s not Project specific, unfortunately, so if you set it to diagnostic and then compile a large project, the Output Window will be huge.

But still, nice to know it’s there.