SublimeMSBuild - MSBuild Package for Sublime Text 2

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Sublime Text 2 is the first text editor that’s actually gotten me excited about text editors(!) for quite some time. It’s fast, clean, super extensible… I bought my license when it was still in beta and I’ve never looked back.

One of the things it was missing was support for MSBuild scripting - syntax highlighting, build execution, and so on. I do a lot of MSBuild work, I wanted to try my hand at Sublime Text 2 extensions, plus I wanted to try out GitHub, so I took the opportunity to roll all of those things into One Giant Project:

SublimeMSBuild - a Sublime Text 2 package that adds support for MSBuild.

Here’s a list of the features it includes:

  • MSBuild file extension handling:
    • .proj
    • .targets
    • .msbuild
    • .csproj
    • .vbproj
  • Build system: Execute the currently loaded MSBuild script and capture the results in the output pane.
  • Syntax highlighting:
    • MSBuild keywords and flow-control elements
    • Standard MSBuild tasks
    • C#/VB special project item elements
    • Well-known item metadata
    • Reserved properties
    • Variables
    • Conditional operators
    • Framework support functions
    • Comment blocks
  • Snippets:
    • New MSBuild Script
    • Comment blocks [trigger = c + tab]
    • Self-closing/simple tags [trigger = > + tab]
    • Content/end-tag tags [trigger = < + tab]
  • Autocompletion:
    • Standard/default tasks (e.g., CallTarget, CombinePath, MakeDir)
    • Project file entities (e.g., Target, Choose, Import)
    • Common item definitions (e.g., Compile, Reference, EmbeddedResource)
    • Well-known item metadata references (e.g., %(Item.FullPath))
    • Reserved properties (e.g., $(MSBuildProjectDirectory))
    • MSBuild Community Tasks (if the MSBuild.Community.Tasks.Targets file is imported)
    • C#/VB special project item elements (e.g., Reference, Compile)
    • Supported framework method calls (e.g., $([System.DateTime]::Now))

Installation is simple. There are two options:

Use Package Control. Package Control is a free package manager for Sublime Text 2. You can select the MSBuild package right from the list of available packages.

Manual installation:

Plus, if you want to muck around with it, add features, or even just see how it works, you can hack on it yourself. There are some pointers in the readme.

I’m personally pretty pleased with how it turned out, particularly the autocomplete/IntelliSense support for the various MSBuild tasks. Try it out, I hope you like it as much as I do.

As far as what I learned along the way… The extensibility model on Sublime Text is pretty awesome and easy to work with. I’m not really a Python guy, but I was able to figure it out pretty easily. And GitHub for Windows is a total gateway drug, so props to Phil Haack and crew for delivering that bad boy.

If you don’t have Sublime Text 2, what are you waiting for?

Once you have it,download and install the MSBuild.sublime-package.

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