I use CMake generated solution for Visual Studio 2010.
In my solution I have several lib projects and one exe project.
For Debug build configuration I use output names like lib1_d.lib, lib2_d.lib etc...
For Release build configuration I use lib1.lib, lib2.lib ...
thanks to CMake I have one extra build configuration I use - RelWithDebugInfo. I use same output names for this build configuration as for Release.
Now here is the problem:
Assuming everything is cleaned.
I hit F5 (run / start debugging) RelWithDebugInfo. All project are built (exe is depending on them) and project runs successfully.
I switch to Release and hit F5 again. All project are built and project runs successfully. (libraries in output directory are overwritten)
I switch back to RelWithDebugInfo and hit F5. VS quickly goes through and gives All outputs are up-to-date. ... Build succeeded. And DOES NOT overwrite lib files in output directory. So application crashes because it uses libraries for other build configuration.
This problem occurs for both ordering Release->RelWithDebugInfo and RelWithDebugInfo->Release
I haven't find a solution, how to add other prefix to RelWithDebugLibraries my SO question
Is there a way, to force Visual Studio 2010 to always overwrite outputs? Preferably by some flag which I can provide from CMake.
The VS build system solves this problem by using different build directories for different configurations. By default, 32-bit Debug output goes to the Debug directory, Release output goes to the Release directory, 64-bit Debug output goes to x64\Debug directory, etcetera. This way different configurations never step on each other's output files.
Looks to me like the mistake you made with your added RelwithDebugInfo configuration is that you didn't modify the output file names. So the build system sees an up-to-date output file from another configuration and doesn't think it necessary to rebuild them.
Coming up with variations of build output file names does get to be impractical once you go past two, do consider the VS-way to do this.
Related
I have a custom MSBuild target included in my C++ project that produces a data file in the $(OutDir) folder for each item of a given item type. I have the item type hooked up with a property page schema so you can select it on files in the solution explorer and my target declares input and outputs so incremental builds work. I have also added my target to the $(BuildDependsOn) property so it is automatically evaluated during the Build target Visual Studio invokes.
Everything seems to work except for one thing: If I delete one of my output data files in the $(OutDir) and then build Visual Studio does nothing and says my project is up to date. If I delete the exe file the project produces or touch the modified time of one of the MSBuild scripts Visual Studio re-evaluates the targts and finds the output file is missing, causing it to be re-built using my target.
From the MSBuild diagnostic logging it seems like Visual Studio is internally maintaining some list of output files and input files that it checks to avoid evaluating the MSBuild script at all. How do I add my output files to this list?
MsBuild/VS indeed have a mechanism to determine what is up-to-date with respect to the input files, it revolves around an executable tracker.exe which scans .tlog files to figure out what a project's output files are. There might be more to it, and if you look around on the internet you can probably get more info about this.
But the thing is you don't really need to understand every single detail of it: you can find a simple usage example for it when inspecting how the built-in CustomBuildStep works and apply that to your case. I'll briefly explain how I got to this because I think it might be useful for you as well in dealing with msbuild questions like these.
If you add
<ItemDefinitionGroup>
<CustomBuildStep>
<Command>echo foo > $(OutDir)\foo.txt</Command>
<Outputs>$(OutDir)\foo.txt</Outputs>
</CustomBuildStep>
</ItemDefinitionGroup>
either manually or via the project's property pages for Custom Build Step you'll see the beahviour is eactly what you need: if foo.txt is deleted a build will start, while a build is marked up-to-date if it is not (well, and when the rest of the outputs are also up-to-date).
Hence the key is to do what CustomBuildStep does under the hood, and figuring that out is just a matter of using your tool of choice to search all occurrences of CustomBuildStep in all files under C:\Program Files (x86)\MSBuild\Microsoft.Cpp\v4.0\V120 (adjust path for platform/VS version used).
This leads us to Microsoft.CppCommon.Targets where the target named CustomBuildStep (mind you, that's the same name as the entry in the ItemDefinitionGroup above) invokes the actual CustomBuildStep command. It also has this particularily interesting bit:
<!-- Appended tlog to track custom build events -->
<WriteLinesToFile Encoding="Unicode"
File="$(TLogLocation)$(ProjectName).write.1u.tlog"
Lines="#(CustomBuildStep->'^%(Identity)');#(CustomBuildStep->MetaData('Outputs')->FullPath()->Distinct())"/>
So this writes the path of the Outputs to a .tlog file in the directory used by the tracker and makes it work as desired. Also see here for more information about the format.
tl;dr Use WriteLinesToFile to append full paths of your targets' outputs to a file like $(TLogLocation)$(ProjectName).write.1u.tlog. I'm saying like because write.tlog, write.u.tlog etc also work.
Visual Studio uses something called Visual Studio Common Project System (CPS) (https://github.com/Microsoft/VSProjectSystem) (VS 2017)
to manage projects, including build process.
Within CPS anything that implements IBuildUpToDateCheckProvider interface can be used
as a 'UpToDateChecker' for a project.
'UpToDateChecker' is invoked before invoking MsBuild. Its main purpose is to determine whether or not invoke MsBuild to build project, or to mark project as 'Up To Date' and skip msbuild all along.
This 'UpToDateChecker' is exactly what prints into diagnostic build output:
1>------ Up-To-Date check: Project: "ProjectName", Configuration:
Debug x86 ------ Project is not up-to-date: build input 'header.h' was
modified after build output 'a.out'. Input time: 12/27/2018 4:43:08
PM, Output time: 1/1/0001 2:00:00 AM
As for C++ Projects, for VS 2017 its default 'UpToDateChecker' is VCProjectBuildUpToDateCheck
( Microsoft.VisualStudio.Project.VisualC.VCProjectEngine.dll ).
As starter, it looks into tlogs directory ( usually something like Debug\x86\.tlog) for these files:
.lastbuildstate
unsuccessfulbuild
all '.read..tlog' - input files, marked as 'build input' in diagnostic build output
all '.write..tlog' - output files, marked as 'build output' in diagnostic build output
There's actually more checks, but most fails occur when checking these 4 types
The original question here relates to C++ projects, but for anyone finding this while searching for information about modern (SDK-style) C#/VB/F# projects, you can customise Visual Studio's fast up-to-date check as described in this document:
https://github.com/dotnet/project-system/blob/master/docs/up-to-date-check.md
In a nutshell, you specify inputs and outputs as items:
UpToDateCheckInput — Describes an input file that MSBuild would not otherwise know about
UpToDateCheckBuilt — Describes an output file that MSBuild would not otherwise know about
It can be very helpful to increase the diagnostic logging level for the up-to-date check via this setting:
You can find out why a project is being rebuilt by enabling the verbosity of the fast up to date checker in the registry key:
New-ItemProperty `
-Name U2DCheckVerbosity `
-PropertyType DWORD -Value 1 `
-Path HKCU:\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\14.0\General -Force
You should be able to see in the build log messages like
Project 'Caliburn.Micro.Silverlight.Extensions' is not up to date. Project item 'C:\dev\projects\Caliburn.Micro.Silverlight.Extensions\NavigationBootstrapperSample.cs.pp' has 'Copy to Output Directory' attribute set to 'Copy always'.
[1] https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/kirillosenkov/2014/08/04/how-to-investigate-rebuilding-in-visual-studio-when-nothing-has-changed/
To enable logging for old-style projects (i.e. non-SDK-style projects, common in the .NET Framework era):
Open a "Developer Command Prompt" for the particular version of Visual Studio you are using.
Enter command:
vsregedit set "%cd%" HKCU General U2DCheckVerbosity dword 1
The message Set value for U2DCheckVerbosity should be displayed.
Run the same command with a 0 instead of a 1 to disable this logging.
More information at: https://github.com/dotnet/project-system/blob/main/docs/up-to-date-check.md#net-framework-projects
Apologies for the nubbery, but I'm having a real pain getting NUnit to run on my Mac. The overall goal is to have Jenkins on our Mac build server build our Xamarin project and run the relevant tests to the .sln file.
I've got NUnit-Console installed and invoking correctly on the mac. However, whenever I pass it /relative/path/to/solution.sln (or .csproj, we don't have a .nunit or built .dll), NUnit finds the the .sln file correctly, however it then throws this error: Could not find file "/relative/path/to/solution\TestProject.csproj".
The .csproj is there, but NUnit seems to want to append a backslash instead of a forward slash. Is there some config option I've missed for this?
Ok so it doesn't look like you can configure NUnit-Console to not do this. If anyone reads this and is looking for a work around, you just need to get your built files from their location, onto a location that Nunit-console running on windows can access.
For my particular use case with Jenkins as the build manager, I've set the project to build on our MAC server, then as a post build action added 'Archive for Clone Workspace SCM'. I've then setup another project called [ProjectName]Tests, which has the other project targeted in 'Source Code Management' > 'Clone Workspace'.
The test project then has my relevant calls to nunit-console as a Windows batch script and everything works as expected!
Hope this helps save others some time if they hit the same issue!
I am using Visual Studio Express 2012. Where is the location of the log file? I have searched in the folder where my solution and projects are stored, but cannot find any .log file.
This is the configuration for logging:
Log file from Visual Studio is only supported for C++ projects. You just have to work with the output window for others.
See this similar thread: VS2010: minimal build log in output and detailed log in log file
And in case you happen to do this for a C++ project, the file is at:
... build log in the intermediate files directory
... The path and name of the build log is represented by the MSBuild macro
expression, $(IntDir)\$(MSBuildProjectName).log.
Use build output instead of logging to file. Instead of copy/paste, simply click somewhere in the output and press CTRL + S to save. Visual Studio will prompt you for a location (tested with Visual Studio 2017, but I'm assuming this works in earlier versions too).
The msdn documentation is pretty clear about this (And you ain't gonna like it!):
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj651643.aspx
Where it says:
To create a build log file for a managed-code project On the menu bar,
choose Build, Build Solution.
In the Output window, highlight the
information from the build, and then copy it to the Clipboard.
Open a
text editor, such as Notepad, paste the information into the file, and
then save it.
While it's true that VS doesn't allow this directly, it is still possible to build with MSBuild "inside" VS2015 and get both the build window output and the log file, as follows: (Arguably this is a bit of a hack.)
In your VS Managed solution, add a new project (Let's call it 'Make').
a. The project type you want is Visual C++/NMake project.
Define the MSBuild commands you need on the command line (see below).
Change the solution configuration to build the NMake project instead of the normal managed projects.
This will create a project that has Build, Rebuild, and Clean command lines where you can execute MSBuild directly. For example:
Rebuild: MSBuild.exe /ds /v:diag /property:Configuration=Debug ..\BuildTest\BuildTest.csproj /t:Clean,Build
Build: MSBuild.exe /ds /v:diag /property:Configuration=Debug ..\BuildTest\BuildTest.csproj /t:Build
Clean: MSBuild.exe /ds /v:diag /property:Configuration=Debug ..\BuildTest\BuildTest.csproj /t:Clean
You can also specify multiple MSBuild.EXE command lines in order to build multiple projects. For the usual build-the-entire-solution outcome you can target only the final end assemblies and let the dependency graph generate the individual targets.
This will produce a .log file, where NAME is the name of the NMake project you used. In the example above, the log would be make.log.
A working example is available on GitHub:
https://github.com/bitblitz/VS_MsbuildExample
(Tested with VS2015)
Note that building individual projects directly will still build with the normal VS behavior, but you can build the full solution inside VS and get the build logs.
We have a TFS build definition set up where we pass the following extra MSBuild arguments in:
/p:DeployOnBuild=true;DeployTarget=PipelinePreDeployCopyAllFilesToOneFolder;_PackageTempDir="\\server\build";AutoParameterizationWebConfigConnectionStrings=false
This has been detailed elsewhere as a way to have the published files copied to a specific location instead of generating a deploy package.
This unfortunately does not work on our build server, however if I run the exact same msbuild command line as called by TFS on my dev machine then it works perfectly and copies the output files to the location.
I have checked the log file and there is no errors, it just seems to completely skip the publish/deploy step.
Done building target "_BuiltWebOutputGroupOutput" in project "xyz.csproj".
Target "PrepareForRun" in file "c:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\v4.0.30319\Microsoft.Common.targets" from project "C:\Builds\2\xyz\xyz build\Sources\xyz.Web\xyz.Web.csproj" (target "CoreBuild" depends on it):
whereas on my local machine, after _BuiltWebOutputGroupOutput target is run the package target runs and deploys the files correctly.
I have tried using different paths and even setting the properties in the project file but it seems to make no difference. My local solution and project files are the same as in the repository that the TFS build is using. Is there something config related on our build server or with the build agent that would cause the packaging target not to run?
I was having a similar problem today and found a fix so it maybe worth a look for you. Here
Normally when a Developer compiles a certain mixed C++/C# solution locally on their machine at our company, they employ the use of a .vssettings configuration file. One of the things included in this config file is reference to various directory paths for Lib and Include files.
However, our buildAgent machines (using TeamCity) are set up to be sterile, and have the bare minimum installed on them required to build any given solution/project. This means the above exampled mixed C++/C# project wont have access to the IDE's configuration where things like include search paths were set. TC accounts for this by allowing you to set all sorts of variables for any given buildConfiguration (or even by buildAgent)....
But how do I get an Include search path to WORK in TC? I'm copying down from Source Control (Perforce) a copy local of what I want Included (1), and then trying to define an Environment Variable (2) -- and yet TC fails the build (3).
I'm sure I have something configured wrong, but for the life of me cant figure out what!
Any help would be most appreciated,
blong
(1) VSC Client Mapping - Perforce
//depot/OpenSource/Boost-1.33.0/boost/... //team-city-agent/OpenSource/boost/...
(2) buildConfig Environment Variable definition
env.Include = %system.teamcity.build.checkoutDir%\OpenSource
(3) TC build log snippet
[16:57:39]: [Project "xxx.sln" (Build target(s)):] e:\buildagent\work\ef1853a454da9d94\xxx\rowsbase.cpp(5, 0): error C1083: Cannot open include file: 'boost/dynamic_bitset.hpp': No such file or directory
First, you should try to compile the solution yourself with msbuild or vcbuild on the command line, because TeamCity will do something similar. If necessary, add msbuild folder to the Path system variable. Then open the command line and type:
msbuild.exe YourSolution.sln
or
msbuild.exe YourSolution.sln /p:Configuration=Release
depending whether you want to do so in debug or release mode. This should give the same C1083 errors.
Here's the fix:
Add the path of the directories you need to add an environment variable (in fact, system variable) that I suggest you call INCLUDE.
Open the file VCProjectEngine.dll.config.xml in folder .../Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0/VC/vcpackages/.
Add the INCLUDE system variable to the include line. To me it came to replacing:
Include="$(VCInstallDir)include;$(VCInstallDir)atlmfc\include;$(WindowsSdkDir)\include;$(FrameworkSDKDir)include"
with:
Include="$(VCInstallDir)include;$(VCInstallDir)atlmfc\include;$(WindowsSdkDir)\include;$(FrameworkSDKDir)include;$(INCLUDE)"
Test it works: Open a new command line (need to after you change environment variables for them to be taken into account) and try to build your solution as shown above. This has worked for me to build C++ solutions with files that #include .
Now let's have it work in TeamCity too. You can run a TC build at this point to see whether it does, but it didn't for me. Go to the "Properties and environment variables" of your TC build configuration, and add an environment variable named INCLUDE with value the same path(s) as in the INCLUDE system variable above.
Now this should work. Hope it helps.
Setting the Build Agent Service to run as a non "local System" account fixed my problem.
I ran into a problem were my C++ projects would build in Visual Studio on the build agent, but they failed when built through TC. The build agent is running windows and agent is running as a service (TeamCity Build Agent Service). The problem was that the service was being run as "Local System" instead of the user that configured Visual Studio. I change service so it would log on as the "build" user and everything worked fine.