I just learned that Visual Studio 2010 and MSBuild are extremely lenient when it comes to which MSBuild vcxproj files will run successfully - they will ignore missing configurations for subtasks and individual files and still successfully complete the build tasks. However, this causes problems for me, as it leads to inconsistent builds in several configurations, and also due to internal inconsistencies in the project files. I cannot edit them in the Visual Studio property view.
So far, I managed to get rid of the most problematic inconsistencies by editing the vcxproj files manually, but this is not a very acceptable strategy, given that this particular solution contains more than 80 project files.
Is there a tool that can check the MSBuild file for internal consistency and highlight missing configurations in the lines "your project files say that it offers X, Y, and Z configurations, but the custom build task for the X file only supports X and Z configurations"?
Update: The specific problem I'm trying to solve right now, in contrast to the more general problem of casting the vcxproj file, is the lack of conventions for certain configurations. Unfortunately, adding and updating conditional expressions seems to require a bit more than I can safely accomplish with the search and replace tool. Doing this programmatically and correctly will most likely require manipulation of the DOM, and given that I am pretty familiar with the internal structure of assembly files, it seems so far that using a text editor capable of performing basic XML structural validation is the fastest way to complete the task at hand .
What I would really like to see would be a tool that can at least highlight these issues automatically in order to reduce the time spent tracking them.
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