MSBuild 4.0 can use Powershell in tasks

The Visual Studio Blog reports on a great new feature in MSBuild 4, as used by Visual Studio 2010: you can now define custom tasks in an MSBuild XML script using PowerShell! This brings all the power of PowerShell and the .Net framework in to play inside the MSbuild system…

The trick is to link in a Windows PowerShell Task factory which doesn’t come with the system. No need to worry about how to write this as a DLL though, as the full source for this is available as an MSDN sample.