In this episode, we use everything we've learned over the last couple of months to avoid doing work. It takes a lot of mistakes but that's still one of the best ways to really learn the ins and outs of MSBuild.
Deployment Dojo S2E7: Inputs and Outputs - Introducing Incremental Build
Wednesday, November 26, 2025
Behind the build
As I mentioned last episode, I tried to present targets, item metadata and batching in isolated lessons. What I discovered is they are very intertwined with each other and today’s topic of MSBuild inputs and outputs.
Our goal was to skip work when nothing changed, better known as incremental builds. Batching, transforms and timestamps are the key pieces we bring together and everything works… mostly. There were several detours in this episode and I even had to break out binary logs to get unstuck once. But that’s the dojo life: build, break, inspect, repeat. And I think the episode landed in a good place. It’s the first time we’ve seen all of these fundamentals operating together where you can feel the value: the target runs only when it should, and skips when it shouldn’t. That’s a very powerful concept once you get it work.
So, if the earlier episodes felt very abstract, this one starts should feel like we’re actually building toward something. And I think we won’t be starting each episode from scratch much longer.
Schedule
The next Deployment Dojo live show is on December 3rd. 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.