I'm working on a project that has a fairly standard Visual Studio 2013 build chain. One of the projects within the solution is used solely for compiling .hlsl files into .cso files, which are then loaded at runtime. When building from within the Visual Studio IDE, incremental builds behave as expected; if I edit color_ps.hlsl only that shader is compiled into its corresponding .cso file.
In the interest of expediting developer workflow, we have a system which automatically recompiles and then reloads shaders at runtime. Essentially, if the application is running and a user edits color_ps.hlsl, I launch MSBuild from the application to rebuild the project containing our shaders, and then reload its corresponding .cso file. Incremental builds here work as expected.
This all works fantastically, the only problem being that it seems that there seem to be some incompatibilities across the IDE and MSBuild. The first time compiling with MSBuild at runtime, all .hlsl files within the project are rebuilt. Further re-builds use incremental building as expected.
Furthermore, after exiting the application, attempting to build the shader project from within the Visual Studio IDE also triggers a full rebuild. Following re-builds use incremental building as expected.
My suspicion as to why this occurs is that the IDE and MSBuild do not recognize that their outputs are already up-to-date. To clarify, the output assemblies produced by compiling from the IDE and MSBuild are identical, and as such should be recognized as being up-to-date regardless of from where the build is being invoked.
Would anyone know a way to prevent these needless full-rebuilds when switching between building from the IDE versus invoking MSBuild at runtime? Thanks!
Related
I have a C++ project in Visual Studio 2017 which includes around 20 .cpp and .h files and some libs. I've noticed when I make small changes like change initialization variable value or add some code VS compiles previous version of the project not including this changes. So I have to do Build->Clean, then Build whole project which takes time.
Why is it happening? As I understand VS Compiler supposed to detect changes and rebuild associated dependencies?
I have inherited a large LOB application that is built using TypeScript. The project has no reference paths in any of the files due to the fact it has been setup and created using Visual Studio 2013 - Visual Studio seems to have some magic where it will pick up the global TypeMaps itself. scoff.
The current build process has been to use Grunt to copy the compiled .js files (which are generated on save in Visual Studio) to a build directory - not actually compile them.
(to further reinforce this point, Grunt is NOT compiling any TypeScript).
This build process is now no longer acceptable as I am moving the application to a build through a Continuous Integration process, using Team City and Command Line tsc.exe/Grunt - so when the repository is checked out there are obviously no generated .js files in the project.
In its current state there is a host of compilation errors when trying to use Command Line tsc.exe/Grunt to compile the TypeScript files, I think due to the fact that the application is not using reference paths?
Does this mean I'm going to need to add all of the relevant reference paths to each file in the project?
Has anyone got any experience regarding this kind of setup and could point me in the right direction to manage these reference paths and build process?
Thanks
In its current state there is a host of compilation errors when trying to use Command Line tsc.exe/Grunt to compile the TypeScript files, I think due to the fact that the application is not using reference paths
No. You should use a tsconfig.json which will create the compilation context.
More
https://basarat.gitbooks.io/typescript/content/docs/project/project.html
A solution has been found.
Using the Visual Studio configuration options in the grunt-ts task I have setup the task to specifically use the projects .csprog and TypeScript 1.4 compiler (we are locked into this compiler).
My configuration for the grunt-ts task:
ts: {
default: {
vs: "Consortium.Client.Web.csproj",
options: {
compiler: "1.4/tsc"
}
}
}
I hope on the off chance, this helps someone else.
I have MFC Dialogue based applications written in VC++6.0. Due to my work environment requirements I need to upgrade to Visual Studio 2010. I don't need to add any new feature, just compile with the upgraded visual studio.
Can any guide me on this?
What are all the primary requirements and how to start it?
Just open the project/solution in VS-2010. Convert it and compile.
You might get some compiler warnings/errors depending on your code, because the new compiler is more precise.
But most conversions lead just to a view warnings, like security stuff and others and should work directly.
From the VC++ team blog and Visual Studio 2010 C++ Project Upgrade Guide:
With Visual Studio 2010, C++ build system moved from the VCBuild based system to the MSBuild based build system.
The C++ project system is also built on top of the MSBuild build system.
There are some limitations, known issues or by design changes that you may run into during the upgrade process.
VS2010 supports upgrading from VC6, VS2002, VS2003, VS2005 and VS2008.
As in previous versions of Visual Studio, upgrade can be done either through IDE conversion wizards or from the command line (Devenv.exe /upgrade).
Here are the recommendations for upgrading your applications:
1) Set up the upgrade environment the same as your build environment
The upgrade process will try to load files and evaluate values during upgrade. If your projects use values that are not defined by the project files themselves, for example, values defined by environment variables, it is required that these environment variables are set up before doing the upgrade. Without these environment variables properly set up, you may get conversion warnings or errors caused by unevaluated values.
2) Make sure you have the required platforms installed before doing upgrade
Converting a project on a machine without all the available platforms for the project will result in a conversion error. For example, if you try to convert a project with Itanium Platform on Visual Studio Professional SKU, which does not support the Itanium platform, you will see a conversion error like the following:
Failed to upgrade 'Debug|<Itanium>'. Please make sure you have the corresponding platform installed under
'%vctargetspath%\platforms\Itanium'. Cannot load the project due to a corrupt project file. The following error
has occurred during XML parsing:
File: D:\Sample\ConsoleApp\ConsoleApp.vcproj
Line: 28
Column: 5
Error Message:
System error: -2147154677.
The file 'D:\Sample\ConsoleApp\ConsoleApp.vcproj' has failed to load.
This is by design as the conversion needs to evaluate the properties in the missing platforms to do a successful conversion. You can verify which platforms are installed on your machine by looking in the following directories: %ProgramFiles%\MSBuild\Microsoft.cpp\V4.0\Platforms (or %ProgramFiles(x86)%\MSBuild\Microsoft.cpp\V4.0\Platforms on x64 machine) for the Platforms installed on the machine.
3) Use native Multi-Targeting to build against VS2008 toolset first if possible
In VS 2010, Native multi-targeting have been added which allows you to build against the Visual Studio 2008 toolset from within the VS2010 IDE using the new MSBuild-based project system. I recommend you to take advantage of this feature by using VS2010 to build against VS2008 toolset first when upgrading. This can help isolate any project system/build system related issues from the tools issues that you may run into after upgrade. This will make the move to the VS2010 toolset much smoother.
Upon upgrade, the property sheet files (.vsprops) are converted to their new format (.props). Likewise, project files (.vcproj) are converted to their new format (.vcxproj). Note, the new project files are generated alongside the old project files. A new file type (.filter.vcxproj) is also generated during conversion. The filter files contain the information that is used to display folders in the solution explorer. This filter information was originally part of the project file. This change was necessary because MSBuild requests a rebuild whenever the project files changes. By storing filter information in a separate file, the filter can be changed without triggering a rebuild of the entire project.
Note: Upgrade process will not convert the .user file. As a result, your debugging and deployment settings will not be preserved after conversion.
In VS2010, a new command line upgrade tool, VCUpgrade.exe is introduced. This command line tool is suitable for upgrading applications with only one project as it cannot take in solution file as input and parse solution information into project files. VCUpgrade.exe is located at: $(VSInstallDir)\common7\Tools directory. This tool will also be shipped in the next release of WinSDK so that the users can do command line upgrade of the project files shipped in WinSDK without Visual Studio IDE.
I am trying to build MSIs in a TFS Build by shelling out to DEVENV.exe (since MSBUILD does not support VSPROJs). In any case, my first installer project builds fine, the second one fails. If I reverse the order, same thing happends (i.e. the error does not follow the project). Looking at the output, I get the following errors:
Deserializing the project state for project '[MyProject].dbproj'
[MyProject].dbproj : error : Error HRESULT E_FAIL has been returned from a call to a COM component.
Also, I get:
Package 'Microsoft.VisualStudio.TestTools.TestCaseManagement.QualityToolsPackage, Microsoft.VisualStudio.QualityTools.TestCaseManagement, Version=10.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a' failed to load
It looks as though the first build tries to serialize the DB project (and it says it succeeds, but there is no DBML file anywhere). Then the second build tries to deserialize the DB project and fails.
I've tried resetting env settings (using the /resetusersettings flag) as well as using the /resetskippkgs flag. Nothing works.
Any ideas?
When you shell out to DevEnv, are you building that specific project (.vdproj file), or are you building the solution? It sounds like VS is trying to open the solution on the build machine and the database and test project systems aren't present.
Have you considered porting your setup project to WiX?
Start simple. Unless you're well versed in the problem you're trying to solve it's usually best to try it "by hand" before getting it running as part of a TFS build. RDP into the build server and try running the necessary commands at the command line and see what happens. You can even go simpler than that and RDP into the build machine and load Visual Studio and build it.
Bottom line is that if you can't get it to build within Visual Studio or at the command line by calling devenv.exe it won't work as part of the team build.
I am using the below Exec task to do precisely what you are doing as part of a TFS build. So I know this works. Your platform and configuration may vary depending on what you're building. The nice thing about this is that you'll have a log file at C:\Temp\MSIBuildOutputLog.txt that you can analyze for additional errors and information.
<Exec Command=""C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\Common7\IDE\devenv.exe" "$(PathToSolution)\solution.sln" /Build "Release|Mixed Platforms" /out "C:\Temp\MSIBuildOutputLog.txt"" />
One important thing to note... There is a bug in VS2010 which causes MSI generation to fail when you try to run it at the command line using devenv.exe. This took me days to find and figure out, but you need this hotfix. Worked like a charm...
http://archive.msdn.microsoft.com/KB2286556
Actually it's the deployment projects that don't support msbuild. FWIW, this is all deprecated in the next release of Visual Studio so you might want to start looking at InstallShield Limited Edition and/or Windows Installer XML now before spending too much time on dead end, broken technology. Both of these alternatives have proper MSBuild support aswell as many other improvements.
It would be perhaps better and quicker to adopt WIX (Windows Installer XML) which is the technology MS now recommends to use within VS/MSBuild/TFSBuild environment to crate MSIs.
It is relatively easy to setup and integrate within your VS Solutions. It uses XML based files to describe your MSIs and uses these files to create your MSIs when you compile.
I would start by downloading Wix from http://wix.codeplex.com/
Once installed you would be able to use the VS2010 integration of Wix based projects to create MSIs. To get started quickly simply add a new Wix project to your solution and reference the projects whose output you wish to combine into an MSI. Next you can run a tool called "Heat" which is included with Wix toolkit to generate the XML files by scanning your projects.
Once you have these XML files, add them to your Wix project and compile.
Visual Studio sometimes decides to rebuild my entire huge project because of one small change. I turned build logging up to Diagnostic to see what was the problem, and here's what I'm seeing:
< Bunch of spam >
Outputs for C:\<snip>\PRECOMPILEDHEADERS.CPP:
C:\<snip>\PRECOMPILEDHEADERS.OBJ
All outputs are up-to-date.
Forcing rebuild of all source files due to a change in the command line
... and then it rebuilds my precompiled headers, then everything else.
This happens when I change a single .cpp or .h file inside the project. I'm not changing anything in the project settings. It also doesn't happen all the time for the same change; it's random.
Any ideas on what's going on here? Where can I get more information? I tried enabling debugging via the description in http://blogs.msdn.com/b/vsproject/archive/2009/07/21/enable-c-project-system-logging.aspx but it didn't give any more information. I can't figure out where this "Forcing rebuild of all source files due to a change in the command line" is coming from. It's not in any of the factory MSBuild files.
Some other info: it's a C++/CLI dll project that links a lot of other projects, including C#, native c++, and other C++/CLI dll's. I tried removing all the C# projects from the dependencies since those tend to cause problems, but that didn't change it. I've googled that specific string, but my situation doesn't match that of any of the other people reporting it. (One was using Intel C++, another was MSBuild from the command line and changing the case. I'm hitting build solution from within Visual Studio itself).
Edit to explain common fixes I've tried:
I've tried building only the project. Does the same thing.
I'm not including any .h files that don't exist.
I've deleted the bin/object folders and rebuilt from scratch. This usually makes it go away for a couple builds, but then it comes right back.
Edit #2:
Found something suspicious earlier in the log:
3>Using "ResolveNonMSBuildProjectOutput" task from assembly "Microsoft.Build.Tasks.v4.0, Version=4.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a".
3>Task "ResolveNonMSBuildProjectOutput"
3> Resolving project reference "..\..\..\..\CommonCore\VS2010\Project1\Project1.vcxproj".
3> Project reference "..\..\..\..\CommonCore\VS2010\Project1\Project1.vcxproj" has not been resolved.
This is repeated for several of my projects... I'm gonna chase that down and see if maybe it's a problem with the project reference hint paths.
Ok, it's an old thread, but I encountered the same problem recently.
My solution was to disable the precompiled headers - now a simple change in one sourcefile won't lead into a "rebuild" any more.
I have had the same problem with Visual Studio 2012 recently. I'm on Windows 7 with Visual Studio 2012 Professional (2012.2) building C++ projects. It's worth noting that I recently migrated the solution from Visual Studio 2008 to Visual Studio 2012.
One of the C++ projects (an executable with a DLL project as a reference) was rebuilding every time one of its compilation units was changed, e.g. simply saving main.cpp would cause all compilation units (including the pre-compiled header) to rebuild. I spotted the the following message in the build logs:
Forcing rebuild of all source files due to a change in the command line since the last build.
I turned build log file verbosity to Diagnostic (Tools > Options > Projects and Solutions > Build and Run) and compared the log files from a clean build and a build after one compilation unit has been changed (which forced a full rebuild). I noticed that:
"Path" had changed from one build to the next (";C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 11.0\Common7\IDE\Extensions\Microsoft\VsGraphics" seems to have been tacked on the end)
there was a difference in TaskTracker.exe command lines to do with CancelEvents
there was a warning about OutputPath not being set
I pulled my hair out.
I eventually resorted to recreating the offending project from scratch rather than relying on the project that was automatically generated during the migration process from 2008 to 2012. It seems to be behaving as expected now.
I did three things, and the problem seems to have gone away. I'm trying to narrow it down a little but I figured I'd go ahead and post them:
Deleted and re-added all the references and project references
Fixed one of my projects that wasn't setting the .NET framework target to 3.5 to match the rest of my solution (I was getting away with it because the project didn't use .NET anyway)
Set "Copy Local Satellite Assemblies" to false for all references including System ones.
Beware that some or all of this stuff might be voodoo...