ItemGroup Element (MSBuild)

Visual Studio 2015

For the latest documentation on Visual Studio 2017, see Visual Studio 2017 Documentation.

For the latest documentation on Visual Studio 2017, see ItemGroup Element (MSBuild) on docs.microsoft.com. Contains a set of user-defined Item elements. Every item used in a MSBuild project must be specified as a child of an ItemGroup element.

Syntax

<ItemGroup Condition="'String A' == 'String B'">  
    <Item1>... </Item1>  
    <Item2>... </Item2>  
</ItemGroup>

Attributes and Elements

The following sections describe attributes, child elements, and parent elements.

Attributes

Attribute	Description
`Condition`	Optional attribute. Condition to be evaluated. For more information, see Conditions.

Child Elements

Element	Description
Item	Defines the inputs for the build process. There may be zero or more `Item` elements in an `ItemGroup`.

Parent Elements

Element	Description
Project	Required root element of an MSBuild project file.
Target	Starting with .NET Framework 3.5, the `ItemGroup` element can appear inside a `Target` element. For more information, see Targets.

Remarks

Example

The following code example shows the user-defined item collections Res and CodeFiles declared inside of an ItemGroup element. Each of the items in the Res item collection contains a user-defined child ItemMetadata element.

<Project xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/developer/msbuild/2003">  
    <ItemGroup>  
        <Res Include = "Strings.fr.resources" >  
            <Culture>fr</Culture>  
        </Res>  
        <Res Include = "Dialogs.fr.resources" >  
            <Culture>fr</Culture>  
        </Res>  
  
        <CodeFiles Include="**\*.cs" Exclude="**\generated\*.cs" />  
        <CodeFiles Include="..\..\Resources\Constants.cs" />  
    </ItemGroup>  
...  
</Project>