Agent Skill
Target Authoring skill
target-authoringdotnet/skillsplugins/dotnet-msbuild/skills/target-authoring/SKILL.md
Canonical patterns for writing custom MSBuild targets. USE FOR: diagnosing and fixing custom target authoring anti-patterns; broken SDK target chains across files (e.g., Directory.Build.targets silently redefining SDK targets); targets that replace CompileDependsOn instead of extending it with $(CompileDependsOn); query targets returning stale results from Outputs vs Returns misuse; missing Inputs/Outputs causing unnecessary rebuilds; missing FileWrites registration. Covers DependsOnTargets vs BeforeTargets vs AfterTargets, the Build→CoreBuild three-level pattern, and the $(XxxDependsOn) chain-extension pattern. DO NOT USE FOR: incremental build tuning (use incremental-build), parallelization (use build-parallelism), general anti-patterns (use msbuild-antipatterns), non-MSBuild build systems.
always on
161 tokname + description
once used
1,345 tokSKILL.md body
bundled files
0
repo stars
5.7kGitHub
Install the Target Authoring skill
Skills CLI (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor and others)
npx skills add https://github.com/dotnet/skills --skill target-authoring
Claude Code, by hand (all projects)
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/dotnet/skills.git /tmp/skills mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills cp -R /tmp/skills/plugins/dotnet-msbuild/skills/target-authoring ~/.claude/skills/target-authoring
For one project only, copy the folder into .claude/skills/ in that project instead. The agent picks it up when a task matches its description.
What it costs your context
Agent Skills load in three steps. Tokens counted with the o200k tokenizer; your model's count will differ a little.
| When | What loads | Cost |
|---|---|---|
| Every session | Name and description | 161 tok |
| When the agent uses it | The SKILL.md instructions | 1,345 tok |
| Only if opened | No bundled files | — |
Until it is used, target-authoring costs about 8.5× less than the median MCP server we measured (1,362 tokens on every turn). Installing all 114 skills from dotnet/skills would load 15,432 tokens of descriptions. Skills vs MCP study
Checks
Our checks found nothing to flag: it follows the Agent Skills specification's naming and size guidelines and doesn't pipe downloads into a shell.
Checked 2026-10-22 · method
What's inside
The headings of its SKILL.md. Read the full file on GitHub.
- Custom Target Authoring Patterns
- The Three-Level Target Chain
- Rules
- Chain Extension — Append, Never Overwrite
- DependsOnTargets vs BeforeTargets vs AfterTargets
- Returns vs Outputs
- Target Naming Conventions
- Complete Custom Target Template
- Common Pitfalls
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