Building all projects of a solution with a mixture of x86 and "any cpu" projects using MSBuild

Is it possible to be able to build all projects of a solution with x86 and "any cpu" projects in it from MSBuild?

Ideally I would like a solution that would work regardless of whether the project has multiple platforms or not because it's often not obvious when you add a project that defaults to x86 and you have to spend a lot of time figuring out why your project isn't being built.

Solution

If your solution has multiple platforms you want to target, it's possible to define multiple configurations to build in your tfsbuild.proj file:

<ItemGroup>
  <ConfigurationToBuild Include="$(BuildFlavour)|Any CPU">
    <FlavorToBuild>$(BuildFlavour)</FlavorToBuild>
    <PlatformToBuild>Any CPU</PlatformToBuild>
  </ConfigurationToBuild>
  <ConfigurationToBuild Include="$(BuildFlavour)|x86">
    <FlavorToBuild>$(BuildFlavour)</FlavorToBuild>
    <PlatformToBuild>x86</PlatformToBuild>
  </ConfigurationToBuild>
</ItemGroup>

MSBuild and TFSBuild will build any projects that match either configurations.