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We're excited to announce the release of Cake.Sdk 5.0.25257.82-beta, a minor preview release that brings improvements to performance, the debugging experience, and native .NET CLI publish support.

.NET Publish Support

The biggest improvement in this release is that dotnet publish now works with Cake.Sdk. This means you can now create self-contained precompiled binaries and containers, which can provide substantial performance gains when the same code is executed multiple times across different stages.

Creating Self-Contained Binaries

You can now publish your Cake scripts as self-contained executables:

dotnet publish cake.cs --output cake.sdk

This will result in a self-contained cake.sdk binary in the output folder, eliminating the need for the .NET runtime to be installed on the target machine.

Container Support

Building containers is now straightforward with Cake.Sdk:

dotnet publish cake.cs \
    --output cake.sdk \
    --target:PublishContainer \
    -p ContainerBaseImage='mcr.microsoft.com/dotnet/runtime-deps:10.0-noble-chiseled' \
    -p ContainerArchiveOutputPath=Cake.Sdk.tar.gz 

Once built, you can import and run the container:

# Import the container
podman load -i Cake.Sdk.tar.gz

# Run the container
podman run -it --rm localhost/cake-sdk:latest

You can also publish directly to a container image registry. This enables powerful scenarios, for example, you can have your build pipeline pre-compiled and cached on build agents for even faster execution.

Feedback Welcome

This is still a preview release, and we'd love your feedback! You can:

• Report issues on GitHub
• Join the discussion on our discussion board
• Contribute to the source code

Package References

• Cake.Sdk - The main SDK package
• Cake.Generator - Source generator for Cake aliases
• Cake.Template - Templates for creating Cake projects

We're excited to see what you build with the enhanced Cake.Sdk capabilities! 🍰

A new preview version of Cake.Sdk has been released! Version 5.0.25253.70-beta brings compatibility with .NET 10 RC1 and introduces powerful new features for modular build script organization. 🚀 🍰

A new preview version of Cake.Sdk has been released! Version 5.0.25225.53-beta brings compatibility with .NET 10 Preview 7. 🚀 🍰

We're excited to announce the preview of Cake.Sdk, a new way to get the Cake tool scripting experience in regular .NET console applications! This brings you the stellar experience of the new "dotnet run app.cs" feature (requires .NET 10), while also working seamlessly with .NET 8 and 9 for regular csproj projects. 🚀 🍰

Here's the minimal example:

After weeks of internal testing and development, we're now expanding the beta for public feedback and contribution. While this is still in early stages, we want to gather early feedback from the community and plan to be ready when .NET 10 launches in November.

Version 5.0.0 of Cake has been released. Take it for a spin and give us feedback on our discussion board.

This release includes new features, improvements and bug fixes to both Cake Scripting and Cake Frosting since the Cake v4.2.0 release! 🚀 🍰

Cake now fully supports running on .NET 9, and with this C# 13, which means you can take advantage of the latest framework, runtime, and language improvements.

Cake itself will no longer run on .NET 6 or .NET 7, but Cake will continue to support the building of .NET Framework projects, as well as projects targeting .NET 7.0 or older.

The supported platform matrix for Cake 5.0.0 will look like this:

The FreeBSD operating system should now be recognized as Environment.Platform.Family PlatformFamily.FreeBSD, and new bool IsRunningOnFreeBSD alias and bool IsUnix alias will now be true for FreeBSD.

We've now set the recommended version of Cake.Core for addins to target to 5.0.0.

This won't break the build, but you might see warnings like the one below when addins or modules are loaded.

The recommended target framework monikers for addins are now:

We are thrilled to announce that Cake.Tool has reached an incredible milestone of 100 million downloads on NuGet.org! This accomplishment wouldn't have been possible without the contributions of over 300 individuals and the unwavering support of our users. Join us as we reflect on the journey of Cake, featuring 129 releases and over 300 third-party community add-ins.

This release was made possible thanks to the Cake team and the contribution of these awesome members of the Cake community listed below:

Full details of everything that was included in this release can be seen below.