Building Testing and Debugging on Mono MSBuild

MSBuild can be successfully built on Windows, OS X 10.11, Ubuntu 14.04, and Ubuntu 16.04.

Mono maintains a fork of msbuild (for now) at https://github.com/mono/msbuild/. You can clone that and use the xplat-master branch or d15.3 for the next release branch.

Unix

Required packages for OSX & Ubuntu

MSBuild currently builds with a prerelease version of .NET Core 1.0. It requires the .NET Core prerequisites, which you can acquire manually or easily get by installing the .NET Core SDK.

• OpenSSL: MSBuild uses the .Net CLI to download Nuget packages during its build process. The CLI requires a recent OpenSSL library available in /usr/lib. This can be downloaded using brew on OS X (brew install openssl) and apt-get (apt-get install openssl) on Ubuntu, or building from source. If you use a different package manager and see an error that says Unable to load DLL 'System.Security.Cryptography.Native', dotnet may be looking in the wrong place for the library.

• Mono when doing a Mono-hosted version of MSBuild

Required packages for Ubuntu

• libunwind is required by .NET Core. Install it using sudo apt-get install libunwind8

Build process

make

Tests

make test-mono

Installing

./install-mono-prefix.sh </your/mono/prefix>

Getting Mono MSBuild binaries without building the code

The best way to get Mono MSBuild for OSX/macOS is to get the official Mono package. After installing it, you can run msbuild.
For Linux, you can install mono and msbuild from here.