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I hate IDEs, is there any way to use Make to build Metro apps from source code?

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You'd probably want to use MSBuild.. –  Mike Christensen Nov 15 '12 at 20:55
Yup, MSBuild is the .NET build scripting framework. Related - stackoverflow.com/questions/11604794/msbuild-windows-8-metro –  jrummell Nov 15 '12 at 20:55
@jrummell How do I download/install MSBuild? What's the executable name? If it's part of Visual Studio, which directory does it appear in? –  mcandre Nov 15 '12 at 22:17
It's part of the Windows SDK. –  jrummell Nov 16 '12 at 13:23
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up vote 2 down vote accepted

MSBuild can natively build Visual Studio projects (*.csproj) or code files directly:

msbuild Project.csproj /t:Rebuild

It's installed with Visual Studio and/or the .NET Framework, and can be found (depending on your framework version) at:


I also just double checked on our Windows 2008 web server (which does not have Visual Studio installed, but does have .NET 4 installed) and it also has MSBuild.exe, so you shouldn't even need VS.

I believe you'll need to run the Publish target to actually create the appx package once the project is built:

msbuild myproject.sln /target:Publish /p:configuration=release /p:platform=win32

MSBuild is extremely powerful and can be extended with .NET code, and comes with tasks designed to do various things. There's tons of tutorials online, but this one might be great to get started.

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You realize he's just asking for the tools to develop metro html5 apps? Not a .NET application or something :) . –  David Mulder Nov 15 '12 at 23:30
Ah, sorry that was unclear. I thought he wanted to build Visual Studio projects, but didn't want to use the IDE. –  Mike Christensen Nov 15 '12 at 23:48
@MikeChristensen Yes, I want to build general VS projects without the IDE, and I'm glad you provided specific examples for Metro projects. –  mcandre Nov 16 '12 at 17:28
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App packager (MakeAppx.exe) creates an app package from files on disk or extracts the files from an app package to disk. It is included in Microsoft Visual Studio Express 2012 for Windows 8 and the Windows Software Development Kit (SDK) for Windows 8.

see this article on MSDN, but I have to warn you... last time I tried to get it signed without an IDE gave me lots of headaches.

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