So I don't follow you.  

When does, Which ones does, Why does: VS put assemblies into the GAC for me?  

Ahh I did not think about the Third Party stuff that comes bundled with VS.  I have never installed any of that stuff as I have never needed it.

I was concerned that VS, not the installer, was going and putting stuff in the GAC.

Jeremy, you've done several "Thou shalt..." posts like this. You should compile them into some type of permanent artifact (can you do that on codebetter.com?) and call it something like 'Jeremy's Umpteen Commandments'.

Here's today's addition:

IV. Thou shalt remember the Build Server, and keep it holy.

Yes you are right. One more reason one shall not use MSTest for unit testing. An installation of VS is required on the build box - eehhh and maybe a licence as well.

No, unfortunately, he is not kidding. In order to run MSTest, you need Visual Studio on the build server. In order to run Code Analysis (formerly FxCop), you need Visual Studio on the build server. In order to check code out of TFS, you need Visual Studio on the build server. Its mind boggling, really. They come out with MSBuild with the great pitch "you can now compile your projects without Visual Studio", and in the same release they throw in all this extra stuff that DOES require Visual Studio.

Now, to be completely honest, none of this is REALLY true. You can hack around with the default MSBuild targets files, find the correct EXEs (MSTest, FxCop) and assemblies (TFS client) on a machine where VS is installed, and include them in a tools folder of you source code repository, just as you would with nunit.exe. You can then run all that stuff on your build server, without VS. But that is completely undocumented (though, I have a half-finished blog post on it), and probably illegal (license violation).

Absolutely. The reason my blog post on how to get around it is "half finished" is that I eventually decided all the hassle wasn't worth it, and reverted to the open source tools. I'd rather encourage others to do the same, rather than tell people how to keep fighting Microsoft's tools.

do you build on a visual studio 2005 and then rebuild it using msbuild on a build machine or what is the recommended process?

THank you

Jeremy,

I think you're absolutely right with both the "so much advantage" and "anywhere but a developer workstation" comments. Microsoft have been very, very good to me all through my career, but even when I'm hired by folks who run all- or nearly all-Windows shops, I find myself using Microsoft tools less and less, for exactly these reasons. (Having shifted to about 80% Web development helps, too.)

Microsoft have just completely lost sight of what it's like to develop anything better than bare-minimum-mediocre software in an environment where the end users (and testers, and etc.) are running significantly different (cleaner) systems than the developers. If all the developers have all the Office and (Microsoft) business apps on their systems, and all the end users have full VS-and-kitchen-sink stacks on theirs, this problem goes away (and Microsoft gets more money, of course).

But sooner or later Microsoft are going to have to get past the Jerry Michalski model of customers-as-consumers. As developers, we should have a reflexive impulse to eliminate dependencies EXCEPT where the gain from including a dependency decisively outweighs the pain of managing the dependency AND at the same time is greater than what could be accomplished in the given situation without that dependency.

We've still got a long, long way to go before the development process resembles engineering more than (honest) craftwork.