It's pretty common to have a bunch of existing tools to include in a build process, and it can be rather a pain to hand-write classes to wrap each of them as proper MSBuild tasks. As we worked on converting the Visual Studio source code to build with MSBuild we realised it would be super helpful to have some sort of tool to assist in writing those wrapper tasks.

As good fortune would have it we had an awesome intern working in the MSBuild team last summer, and she wrote a nifty application to help with this process. The application is called TaskGenerator, and it lets you describe a command-line tool with XML, then it'll generate the appropriate MSBuild task source code that wraps the tool.

We were hoping that this tool would be our first post to the new GotDotNet site, but they've had a few complications during their upgrade. Rather than wait, we're making it available now as a technology preview. We're using the new Microsoft Community License for the release, and while there's no source code for the tool at the moment we will change that sometime during November. This release was built against build 2.0.50727 of the .NET Framework, and will not work against earlier releases.