MSBee [MSBuild Everett Environment] 1.0 is now code complete, meaning we're just a few days away from the final release. Subsequently, our MSBee shared source release is also on track and will be available soon.

Earlier today, I was reading a blog post by Josh Ledgard, a co-worker on the Solutions team. The post discussed feedback he received on keys to successful source releases and I wanted to respond to some of those suggestions by explaining what we've done for the MSBee release.

Multiple people provided feedback that the open source community is becoming very fond of the Microsoft "permissive" license. We've noticed that as well and the MSBee source release will come with a permissive license.

Another individual mentioned lowering the barrier to entry when it comes to contributing. Specifically, he's been frustrated by projects that require tons of dependencies and, even after installing them, have other nuisances that require additional work before he can successfully build.

For MSBee, we made a conscious effort to significantly reduce the pain of that experience. We've intentionally used publicly available tools for code analysis (FxCop), testing (NUnit), and building the MSBee installer (WiX). All these tools are available as binary distributions so you don't need to build them while you're trying to build MSBee. We also provide a MSBuild file that lets you specify where you’ve installed these tools. This file is imported by all the MSBee projects so once you add your paths to the Settings file, all the projects become aware of the tool locations. Additionally, by using a MSBuild file, we can give you an informative error if you forget to provide a path in the Settings file, instead of a cryptic build error.