Microsoft is planning to release MSBuild as open source for the community on GitHub. The bits which you download from GitHub are closely aligned with the version that ships with Visual Studio.
“We got off to a good start with working in the open on GitHub: We are currently tracking 54 open issues, 30 are closed. We accepted 69 pull requests out of 82 that are now closed. 19 different people contributed, many outside of the Microsoft organization. There are 389 forks already, we got 2093 stars, and 323 people are watching. Many thanks to everyone who participated already!”, said Nikolai Tillmann, Microsoft.
However, porting MSBuild to .NET Core will take some time since it requires few backend work. The main aim is to have a single open source code base that works cross-platform. Microsoft has announced the following goals in the quest to make MSBuild open source
- Drastic simplification of how you author and maintain build specs
- First class support for packages
- Hugely improved performance by leveraging the cloud
- Unprecedented reliability through better knowledge of dependencies
We hope the above development will provide great scope for developers in their quest to build reliable software applications.