.NET Rocks! Cake.SDK with Mattias Karlsson
Nov 6, 2025
In this conversation, Mattias Karlsson, a Senior architect and Cake maintainer, shares exciting insights about Cake.SDK and its integration into .NET applications. He explains how Cake enhances build automation and facilitates CI workflows. Mattias discusses the benefits of Cake over traditional tools like MSBuild and YAML, as well as its ability to manage environments and security. He also highlights community contributions and hints at future developments, including the upcoming Cake 6.0 and its alignment with .NET 10.
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Cake As A C# Build Framework
- Cake is a cross-platform build orchestration framework that lets you write build scripts in C# instead of YAML.
- Moving Cake into an SDK lets developers reference build capabilities directly from a normal .NET project file with IDE support.
Strong Typing Beats YAML Fragility
- Cake provides strongly typed aliases for common tasks like build, pack, file operations and zipping to avoid YAML idiosyncrasies.
- Strong typing and IntelliSense reduce configuration mistakes and improve discoverability across CI platforms.
Run Builds Locally For Faster Feedback
- Use Cake when your build does more than simple dotnet pack or when you want local iteration and strong typing over YAML.
- Test and run build scripts locally for faster feedback and use Cake aliases for discoverable, strongly typed actions.