spiking a custom MSBuild Task

My team has a bunch of MSBuild tasks. Most of them write their input parameters to the log, like this:

Loading Gist 7517928

As of recent versions of MSBuild, this logging already happens automatically, but only in diagnostic logs. Those logs are so big as to be unusable for us, so we want this information to appear in the detailed (or perhaps normal) logs.

Today, I want to explore two ideas:

1. Using TDD on MSBuild tasks, and
2. Removing duplication of this logging code.

I'll start with a spike, to confirm that I do indeed know how to write & run a custom MSBuild task. The task implementation is presented above. Next, I write a small MSBuild project:

Loading Gist 7518019

And then run it on the command line (the 2nd run is with diagnostic verbosity, so you can see what the built-in logging looks like)

Loading Gist 7518058

Great, I know how to do something. :-)

Next up, turn this in to a test.