Episode 5 steps into intermediate MSBuild territory with item metadata. We explore the attributes that slice and dice our collections of objects and unlock MSBuild's more advanced behaviors.
Deployment Dojo S2E5: Metadata — Objects, Collections, and a Dash of Chaos
Wednesday, October 22, 2025
Behind the build
After four episodes of fundamentals (properties, items, targets, imports, and conditions) it was almost time to actually do something. I know. I know we’re still waiting to do something more than really round-about ways to printf text to the screen. But this episode 5 I is where I’d say we’ve entered “intermediate MSBuild” and explains so of the more “line-noise” looking syntax in MSBuild: item metadata.
There’s a lot of discovery in this one. I try to keep episodes focused on one topic and this one is tricky to get started without accidentally introducing more advanced topics. So, I trip over a few edge cases, run into some of MSBuild’s stranger error messages (“unrecognized metadata”), but by the end do a pretty job exploring the way item metadata behaves. But that’s the joy of the dojo. We hack, we explore, we break things and we put them back together to truly understand the topic at hand.
Next episode, we’ll take all this metadata knowledge and put it to use with batching!
Oh, and we took a question from chat into some truly nonsensical conditions.
Schedule
The next Deployment Dojo live show is on November 5th but episode 6 recordings will come out next week. And here’s the monthly rhythm:
- First Wednesday: Deployment Dojo Live show
- Second Wednesday: FireGiant Office Hours
- Third Wednesday: WiX Online Meeting live
- Fourth Wednesday: Deployment Dojo replay available
Until then, keep coding. You know I am.