How To's

Cake makes a number of assumptions about files and directories in your project. If you're adding Cake to a brand new project then that isn't a problem, but what happens if you're adding Cake to a 'legacy' project that is already using some of these locations?

It's no secret, I like Cake. When I have to write a script to build my source code, I use Cake. On my most recent expedition writing a Cake script to publish a UWP application, I noticed Hockey App publish failed, Cake.HockeyApp was throwing an exception.

Since version 0.18.0 of Cake, there has been support created for Visual Studio 2017. The support was added to the MSBuild tool to search for the default installation locations of the various flavors of MSBuild. The default locations did not require an external dependency on the Microsoft.VisualStudio.Setup.Configuration.Interop package that was created by Microsoft to help locate Visual Studio 2017 installations.

Shortly after the release of version 0.18.0, Microsoft released a tool called vswhere to help locate Visual Studio and other products in the family. This tool was released with Cake version 0.19.1 to allow everyone that moved to Visual Studio 2017 to get their builds up and running.

This post is going to walk through the different pieces of functionality supported by the VSWhere tool.

We released the Cake for Visual Studio extension back in September and have been thrilled with the response from the whole community. There's been plenty of activity over on the GitHub repo with new issues, bug reports, features and even PRs. Now, you can get the benefits of all the brand new features as they arrive, right in Visual Studio.

As you might already know, debugging Cake scripts using Visual Studio has been supported since the v0.12.0 release of Cake. But since the v0.16.1 release of Cake, thanks to porting Cake to .NET Core, it is now also possible to debug Cake files using Visual Studio Code.