"Before we begin, it’s important you understand what we’re getting into. Not to mince words, but
MSBuild is a stringly typed, semi-documented, XML-guzzling,
paradigmatically muddled, cursed hellmaze"

SO TRUE !! Thanks for this article, the first and only one I found on defining a Custom ToolChain!!

Here an full sample of Customized ToolChain really awesome: https://github.com/lexxmark...

"Thank you" x 100. I've rummaging through MS' online docs for hours and wilted under its layers of abstraction and obtuse XML. It's ironic that the clearest explanation for this comes from an outside, unofficial blog post.

Hi,

Excellent writeup. I've used it to improve how we deal with Protocol Buffers at work. protoc.exe, as you may know, also generates a source file that should be compiled. So I added a second new target which does nothing except adds <clinclude> and <clcompile> items using the "iterate" approach mentioned in the blog post.

I ran in to the same problem you did here: https://developercommunity.... but I wasn't immediately able to get the GetOutOfDateItems task to work. It still complained about not finding the tlog files, I think it's because of the CustomBuild *target* (not task) that runs earlier. I managed to hack around it by creating a new dir "$(TLogLocation)proto" and make GetOutOfDateItems and CustomBuild use that:


<getoutofdateitems sources="@(PROTO)" outputsmetadataname="Outputs" tlogdirectory="$(TLogLocation)proto" tlognameprefix="CustomBuild">
<output taskparameter="OutOfDateSources" itemname="OutdatedProtos"/>
</getoutofdateitems>
<custombuild sources="@(OutdatedProtos)" minimalrebuildfromtracking="false" trackerlogdirectory="$(TLogLocation)proto"/>


You write that you made GetOutOfDateItems work for you. Is your approach different from mine?

Edit: I have no idea why the stuff inside code tags gets lowercased... Oh well

Edit: It works if I invokve MSBuild, but not if I use Visual Studio :(

Update (your blog post seems to be a bit popular): I managed to get it to work well by just giving the tlog files a different TLogNamePrefix (in <getoutofdateelements>) and not messing with the directory. I thought I had tried that already... Oh well.

Now it also works as expected in Visual Studio. It seems VS will look for any .tlog file, but not in subdirs.