MSBuild goes famous, MSDN docs don't

It looks like MSBuild 3.5 got a new champion – none other than Scott Hanselman himself! He recently published two posts on how build time may be drastically improved on multi-core machines with new 3.5 multiprocessor support.

While I certainly like that additional visibility for MSBuild coming from the popular online author, for me it also indicates something else (not as positive) – most people become really allergic to MSDN content, to the point where they never read it. In later years, MSDN content tends to be late/incomplete/not helpful, so it ceased to be first resource you look into (for MS technologies, that is). And additionally, the visibility of MSDN content in the search engines results is so lame, the content may just as well be non-existent.

But for MSBuild, the content is there, and it provides very decent handling of various MSBuild topics. For example, speaking of 3.5 specific features:

• Building for multiple processors
  
• Targeting specific .NET frameworks with MSBuild (aka ToolsVersion Project attribute)
  
• Item Definitions (aka ItemDefinitionGroup element)
  
• New Methods for Manipulating Items and Properties (properties and items under Target element, Remove Item attribute)
  
• Registry Look-Ups
  

Overall, MSDN MSBuild content node contains loads and loads of pertinent information. So I thought – what's the heck, I shall try to provide some visibility for the good stuff.

And speaking of content, if you are interested in everything MSBuild there is couple of must-have blogs to follow: MSBuild Team blog and Sayed Hashimi's blog. Oh, and probably Scott Hanselman will chime on as well, so make sure you keep reading his blog!