MSBuild Context Menu: Build .NET Project/Solution From Explorer

with 3 comments

Sometimes I don’t like opening visual studio just for building the latest source code from the repository. I don’t remember who wrote the original registry tweak for this, but the credit goes to the original author.

The original tweak allowed to compile Visual Studio 2005 solutions as I use Visual Studio 2008 I had to modify the original tweak to make it work with VS2008. Click Here to download the modified files.

image1

Unzip the files and you will see two folders. VS2005 is the original one and VS2008 is the modified version. Each  folder contains two registry files. One to add the commands to windows explorer and another to remove them. If you have both VS2005 and VS2008 installed on your machine you can add both the versions to the registry or you can add either of them.

image2 Once you have merged the files in your windows registry you can see two commands added to your explorer context menu when you right click on any solution or project file. One for Debug build and one for Release build.

When you click on either of the commands a command window will open and you can see you build status.

image3

Download the modified files MSBuild-VS2005-VS2008.zip

Credit goes to the original author.

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Written by Zuhaib

May 15th, 2009 at 10:50 am

3 Responses to 'MSBuild Context Menu: Build .NET Project/Solution From Explorer'

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  1. The ZIP archive seems te be damaged. I tried to open it using WinRAR and Windows default ZIP opener, also tried different browsers to download. Could you do me a big favor and check the file? Thanks!

    [ Reply ]

    Robert Massa

    8 Jan 10 at 9:07 am

  2. I checked the zip is fine. I have again uploaded it by zipping it using windows default ZIP software.

    Try unzipping using 7zip

    [ Reply ]

    Zuhaib

    9 Jan 10 at 11:43 am

  3. Sometimes you can consider a more feature rich solution, while it is still simple to use, :)

    http://msbuildlaunchpad.codeplex.com/

    [ Reply ]

    Lex Li

    15 May 10 at 10:24 pm

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