Question: Future of the project alongside Microsoft.Build.Sql

[sloncho]

Hello,
I was using MSBuild.Sdk.SqlProj for awhile now, as it was helping us building dacpac on a linux CI/CD agents. But now as Microsoft has released Microsoft.Build.Sql 2.0.0, which kind of solves the agent build, I was wondering what are the future plans for MSBuild.Sdk.SqlProj.

Also, I could not readily find a comparison between the 2 sdks. Is there some feature matrix?

Cheers, great project btw.

[ErikEJ]

@sloncho Thanks for the kind words. As I see it, the future for this project looks quite bright, actually.

You are right, there is no comparision between the 2 SDKs - they are very similar, but I am aware of the following main feature of MsBuild.Sdk.SqlProj currently missing from Microsoft.Build.Sql:

• Support for package references to custom analyzer rules when using VS 2022/VS 2026
• Support for Visual Studio 2026
• Some great integrations: https://github.com/rr-wfm/MSBuild.Sdk.SqlProj?tab=readme-ov-file#integrations

Maybe @jmezach can think of others?

[jmezach]

MSBuild.Sdk.SqlProj was born out of a lack of being able to build SQL Server Database Projects on anything other than Windows. We had the need to change that at our company, so when I saw that DacFx had been ported to .NET Standard back in the day I did a small proof of concept to see if I could use that to produce .dacpac's from a command line tool. Turned out I could, so I figured it would be easy enough to wrap that up into an MSBuild SDK to have a path forward for building on other operating systems.

This was all way before Microsoft.Build.Sql even existed. I have talked with the team building that and I think that at least for the time being both projects can happily co-exist. Given the number of NuGet downloads it appears this project is being used fairly heavily. I haven't really looked at what a migration to Microsoft.Build.Sql would look like. Honestly I don't think it is even worth it at this point, but this might change in the future of course. For now we are actively using it internally on a daily basis, so I don't see us abandoning this project anytime soon.

And as @ErikEJ mentioned there are still some things you cannot do with Microsoft.Build.Sql yet that you can do with MSBuild.Sdk.SqlProj. So if those things are important to you then I see no reason NOT to adopt MSBuild.Sdk.SqlProj.