I have several Visual Studio .vcproj files which are auto generated, I would to automate the process of creation a solution file which includes all those .vcproj files.
Are there any command line tools which I can use the automate this as part of our build process?
P.S. It is possible to write some code to handle the necessary processing to handle this. However I am hoping for a MS provided commmand line tool which can handle various version of Visual Studio for now and the near future.
Visual Studio does have tools for generating GUIDs. If you reverse engineer .sln and .vcproj files using a text editor, you'll know enough to put together a script that can write a solution file.
From this link, you get some clues about the project type GUID:
The first GUID listed for each project is the type of project. For instance, a VB.NET project (vbproj) has this GUID: {F184B08F-C81C-45f6-A57F-5ABD9991F28F}. You can find all the GUIDs that Visual Studio uses in the registry under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\VisualStudio\7.1\Projects\
The second GUID identifies the individual project. It corresponds to the GUID value found in the project listed in the solution file.
I'm about to give this a shot. Like someone said in the comments, this is a bit of a niche problem, so you may need to roll your own.
Related
I'm working ona project containing thousands of solutions (.sln) and tens of thousands of .cs/.cpp/etc files.
How can i find which solution(s) a source file is a part of?
Source files aren't part of a solution. They are part of a project, which in turn is part of a solution. The source file itself has no notion of being part of the project though. The project has a reference to the file but not the other way around. One source file can be part of multiple projects, which might be part of different solutions.
What you could do is parse the SLN and VBPROJ/CSPROJ/whatever files to see which ones refer to a particular source file. Those files are just text and contain various information about the solution or project, including what projects are part of a solution and what files are part of a project. You could recursively parse the files in folder to build up an entire tree representing the files in the projects in the solutions.
Note that most files are going to be referred to by relative paths in the project file.
Start with Visual Commander and then you can programmatically access your solution "DOM-style" using Visual Studio's Automation and Extensibility for Visual Studio API. Write a VS command in a .NET language that traverses a solution into its projects and then into the project items, dumping all files found (project items) into a log file, database, web service, what have you.
See e.g., this article HOWTO: Navigate the files of a solution from a Visual Studio .NET macro or add-in on how to navigate Visual Studio's DTE.
I know SO frowns on answers containing just links and not true help, but the documentation for EnvDTE in its various flavors is extensive and any code sample to demonstrate how to use it would be quite large. So I'm just giving you this strong hint: Look at the Visual Studio extensibility model, and hook into it easily via Visual Commander which does all the hard work of wrapping your code in a Visual Studio extension. From there you can use any reasonable technique (MSBuild, PowerShell, batch files) to load each solution into VS and run your new command.
This actually answers the question: For all source files used by any of my thousands of solutions, which solutions use them. But I see that you (#Sabz), below in a comment, give a reasonable way to answer the question for one source file at a time, which is more precisely what you asked.
N.B.: I have not (yet) used Visual Commander so I'm just assuming it works as advertised.
I create a new custom project type using a VSPackage project inheriting of MPF library (http://mpfproj11.codeplex.com/). As a result I obtain a .vsix but I need add this project type using a .msi. I'm using the Visual Studio 2010 Setup projet for it. In my setup project I add the content of the VS Package in the same directory where the .vsix put then, but I think Ineed to put in the registre the new type of project because when I use the setup , the project template does not come out in Visual Studio and when I give double click the file with extension of the type of new project and does not recognize it. When I look the registry after install the vsix, this was one of the things that I found diferent. I add this entries in my setup project but It's not working yet.I'm missing something else?
In the projecttemplatedir is the directory where I put the .dll of the project type, the vsixmifest and pkgdef. The project template is in [User]\Documents\Visual Studio 2013\Templates\ProjectTemplates\[Name of new Project Type]\[projecttemplate.zip]
Best Regards
PS: The project type is for VS 2013 but I'm using the VS 2010 Setup project ;)
OK, so first the "don't"s of doing this:
In general, if you are installing via MSI you shouldn't be doing anything user-specific -- no writing in HKEY_CURRENT_USER, nor writing within their Documents folder, LocalAppData, or Visual Studio folders, etc. If you see yourself writing files or registry keys in either of those places, that should be your hint that there's a better way to do what you're trying to do. For what you've shown so far, this raises more than a few red flags for me.
Second, don't ever go writing keys into 12.0_Config. That part of the hive is nothing more than a cache that's built up from other parts of the registry and on-disk .pkgdef files from extensions. It's rebuilt in any number of senarios, including installing new extensions. Any writes there you should presume will get blown away at any time. If you need to write things there you should either (a) write in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\[version] and run devenv /setup or (2) [preferred] put your keys in a .pkgdef inside your extension which gets merged into 12.0_Config for you automatically.
Now the dos:
You said you already had a .vsix produced by the SDK: you can put project templates in there. You can then register those templates in the .vsixmanifest and those will pull in. That's far easier than mucking around with files in Documents -- that's the user's directory...don't go playing with that.
Once you have a .vsix that does most of what you need, you should simply take the files within that and install the files in a folder within C:\Program Files [(x86)]\Microsoft Visual Studio 12.0\Common7\IDE\Extensions. Even better, you might just want to WiX toolset to build your installer, since it has built-in support for installing extensions. It also has built-in support for invoking the "/setup" process if that's what you need to do as well. Visual Studio Setup projects are no longer supported in newer versions of Visual Studio, so you're better off starting with a technology that isn't already obsolete. WiX is even what we use at Microsoft to do the setup work for Visual Studio itself, so it's definitely up to the task.
Last point: almost everything when it comes to Visual Studio extensibility can be done with a VSIX directly, so presume there's a good way to do something that way before falling back to an MSI. Internally, we can register the entire C# and VB language services with just a VSIX -- they're quite powerful.
I found the answer in this link Registering Project and Item Templates. I set projecttemplatedir entry with
[User]\Documents\Visual Studio 2013\Templates\ProjectTemplates[Name of new Project Type][projecttemplate.zip] that is where i put the project template.
I have personal Visual Studio projects that I would like to expose to the internet. I'm using BatchPurifier to remove metadata from various files but I doubt it gets whatever Visual Studio does.
You only need to "expose" the solution, project and source code files. These are all plain text files that do not contain metadata and can be reviewed with a simple text editor. They do not contain secrets unless you put them in yourself.
If you have resources as well then it is entirely up to whatever program or device created the file, Visual Studio isn't involved.
Poking around github or codeplex is a good way to find out how other programmers publish their projects.
Open the solution and project files in a text editing program such as notepad and remove any metadata you find unnecessary. I doubt you will find a tool to remove exactly what you want, you'll have to do it manually.
I am working on an big old project. MSBuild is used as the build engine. And I see a lot of .proj, .bat, .sln and .csprj files used in the build process.
I know that .sln file and .csprj can be edit relatively easily with Visual Studio. But is there some easy way to help write and comprehend the .proj and .bat files?
Also, I am lost in the numerous environment variables such as $(SolutionFolder), where can I find the definitions for them?
Many thanks...
The following description is based on how I made use of such files in the open source project, http://code.google.com/p/lextudio/source/browse/#svn%2Ftrunk%2Ftrunk
.sln and .csproj should never be manually edited unless you are asked to. They should be mainly maintained by developers via Visual Studio.
Your focus should be put on the .proj file, where custom targets and properties are set. They are usually manually created and calling MSBuild to build .sln/.csproj in an expected way.
You can edit .proj files inside Visual Studio, as VS knows it is a MSBuild script type.
.bat files are usually wrappers over the core .proj file, so as to let you execute a certain target with expected properties, so it may only contain a call command to MSBuild.exe. I usually use Notepad++ to edit such files, as n++ provides highlighting for .bat files.
Many of the predefined properties are documented by Microsoft, as the link posted by #mortb shows.
.bat files are batch files. They cointains script that are executed by the windows command prompt. Each row contains a statement (like copy, execute program etc) that could be entered at the command prompt. I usually edit bat files in notepad, you may also edit them as text in visual studio. The windows help contains more information about batch files.
.proj is a generic Visual Studio project file
Finding a reference to the variables wasn't too hard:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/c02as0cs.aspx
Hope this helps
Google reveals many tools for taking Visual Studio format sln/vcproj files, and producing a make file from them. But I can't find one that solves the opposite problem - I have a make file that references hundreds of .c and .h files and (for convenience, for debugging, for writing code in the VS IDE) would like to open it as a Visual Studio project.
Where can I find a tool to take an arbitrary make file as input, and produce Visual Studio project/solution files as output?
Makefile Project Wizard
You might be able to find a converter for a well-constrained set of makefiles, but a converter for any arbitrary makefile would be tricky. They are mini-programs, after all, that would have to be evaluated. And not all makefile concepts map directly to Visual Studio projects.
If you only have one project to worry about, I'd just manually put together a project in Visual Studio (tip: you can select more than one file in the "Add existing file..." dialog). If you do this regularly, perhaps look into a tool like Premake or CMake to help automate the generation of the projects (and if necessary, a new Makefile) for you.