The FireGiant Cinematic Universe added another character to the Deployment Dojo in Episode 2, the one and only Bob Arnson. David was away on business so Bob stepped in for our lesson on MSBuild Targets. We cover a lot about this fundamental MSBuild concept.
Deployment Dojo S2E2: Stay on target
Wednesday, June 25, 2025
Behind the curtain
Overall, I feel like this show went waaaaay smoother than the first one. Seeing the muscle memory for talking while typing coming back so quickly feels good. Unfortunately, my time estimation skills are still lacking.
You see, I originally planned to cover two topics in this show: targets and imports. However, around the 30-minute mark, I realized we still had a lot more to cover about targets. So, even though I gave Bob the option to cover both topics, I decided to “stay on target” and cover only one topic.
And we still went 20 minutes longer than my target for the show. But I like how everything flowed together and how much of the topic we covered.
S2E2 MSBuild Targets in depth
Just like in the first episode, we’re still talking about fundamental building blocks of MSBuild. Targets are how MSBuild schedules work. There are a lot of different ways to schedule work with: DefaultTargets, DependsOnTargets, BeforeTargets and AfterTargets. We cover all of those in this episode with lots of examples to show how each works and how they interact with each other.
Schedule
The next Deployment Dojo live show is a week from today on July 2nd. And here’s the monthly schedule:
- First Wednesday: Deployment Dojo Live show
- Second Wednesday: FireGiant Office Hours
- Third Wednesday: WiX Online Meeting live
- Fourth Wednesday: Deployment Dojo replay available
In the meantime, keep coding. You know I am.