Sorry you had trouble. Note that I did specify later in the post that you will need to wrap a root element around the variable definitions. MSBuild will always strip off the outer element that contains the XML document when it passes it to your custom task.

<_VariableDefinitions>
  <Root>
    <VariableDefinition Name=“Var1“ NewValue=“Val1“ />
    <VariableDefinition Name=“Var2“ NewValue=“Val2“ />
    <VariableDefinition Name=“Var3“ NewValue=“Val3“ />
  </Root>
</_VariableDefinitions>

That outer <Root> element is required for it to be a valid XML document once the <_VariableDefinitions> element is stripped. I don’t recall what MSBuild will do if it’s missing – but sending an invalid document containing just VariableDefinition elements could be the result. Also note that the name of the root element is irrelevant – the XML parsing code doesn’t care.

<_VariableDefinitions>
<VariableDefinition/>
..
<_VariableDefinition/>
<_/_VariableDefinitions>

We only got
<_VariableDefinition/>
..
<_VariableDefinition/>_

..

We only got

..

I modified the custom task with the following which solved the problem:

private const string ROOT_ELEMENT = “”;
private const string ROOT_ELEMENT_FORMAT = “{0}”;
private string _variableDefinitions;
public string VariableDefinitions {
get { return _variableDefinitions; }
set
{
value = value.Trim();
if (!value.StartsWith(ROOT_ELEMENT))
value = string.Format(ROOT_ELEMENT_FORMAT, value);

_variableDefinitions = value;
}
}

There is probably a way of solving this with MSBUILD but I’m more comfortable with c# so that was my solution. Perhaps this is caused by differences between the versions we have so for the sake of comparisson:

TFS 2008 SP1