Today I had to configure an MSBuild script to read some data from a file. First I was looking for a custom task to achieve this goal. But I found that this functionality is out-of-the-box available in MSBuild.
You can read from a file into a variable using:
1: <ReadLinesFromFile File="c:\ReleaseNumber.txt">
2: <Output TaskParameter="Lines"
3: ItemName="ReleaseNumber" />
4: </ReadLinesFromFile>
This will store the contents of the file "ReleaseNumber.txt" in a property "ReleaseNumber". You can then use this property in other places inside your build file:
1: "@(ReleaseNumber)"
You can also write to files:
1: <WriteLinesToFile File="Log.txt" Lines="This is a log value." Overwrite="false" />