When I do builds in Visual studio, it would be great to have a better indicator that the build is done.
Sometimes I navigate away from VS while it is building and I have to switch between VS and another window to find out if VS finished building.
Are there ways to make the "build is done" status more obvious? Play a sound or something else?
You can use Growl for windows to hook up to Visual Studio.
Set it up with the visual studio plugin (found here), and you will have very clear indication of build success/failure.
Notifications show up like this:
If you use the Sounds control panel applet, you'll find that there is a section for Visual Studio. "Build Success" is one of the sounds.
I prefer "Windows Print Complete", which gives a nice "cheery" sound. I use "Windows Hardware Fail" for build failure. It really sounds like something is badly wrong.
Related
When trying to open an older C++ project in Visual Studio 2019 Professional, I keep getting this "Review Solution Actions" dialog that hangs Visual Studio.
I've tried starting in safe mode and resetting my user settings but neither of those have done anything.
Once this dialog shows up it just hangs here and I cannot focus on this dialog or Visual Studio. It's as functional as the image of it posted in this question.
I can successfully "End Task" in Task Manager (as opposed to killing the process) so it's still doing something in the Windows message loop (and redrawing)-- but strangely won't obtain focus or allow drags. Haven't seen that before.
Is there a way to retarget this project via the command line? Is there something else I can do?
Version: VisualStudio.16.Release/16.4.5+29806.167
Updating to 16.5.2 resolved this, thankfully.
Sometimes in VS2017 Visual Studio takes forever to run a new project and all the while it is showing an icon in the bottom of the status bar that looks like this:
I would guess that this means that it's downloading something, but what? It's frustrating that Visual Studio doesn't provide better messaging about what's going on given that sometime the process may take five minutes or more and I'm not sure what it is doing.
What does this icon mean? And is there any way to see what Visual Studio is doing in such a situation?
I found a related question Visual Studio stuck initializing with strange icon in status bar but it does not answer my question.
It isn't about downloading. Visual Studio 2017 (and earlier versions as well) shows this icon in the status bar during the building process.
You can see more information in the Output window, click View → Output
You may notice that suddenly a project that normally builds quickly is taking a long time to build.
I've now personally been caught by this about 3 times myself.
This can occur in VS 2017 because VS 2017 has code analysis available. If you compile your project using "Debug with code analysis instead of "Debug" selected this will run full code analysis on your code during the build process.
I just opened a project that i havent opened for awhile and "debug with code analysis" was the default option when i opened it. So this caught me just a few minutes ago.
What makes this confusing is that the drop down box in visual studio is not very wide. So it is often difficult to see that you are compiling with code analysis because the text is cut off as can be seen in this image below and a developer only sees "Debug w" and they don't realize they are compiling with code analysis.
Hope that helps.
thanks
Matt
Would be a nice thing - do I have to write a script or can't I just tweak the build script to do some task?
Windows already has support for this, go to the Control Panel and open up Sounds and Audio Devices. Under the Sounds tab there is a section for program events. If you scroll down far enough one of the sections will be Microsoft Visual Studio. Then just pick the sound you want to hear for Build Succeeded and Build Failed. You will need to restart Visual Studio after choosing your sounds.
If you don't want to enable it for every single build, you can make an application that plays a sound, and add it into the post build event for that project.
I also wrote an extension for Visual Studio to achieve that. It also can play a sound when tests finished to run.
Visual Studio Ding extension
I have just discovered macros in Visual Studio and I can't be happier. Well... I have my complaints but... you know ;)
A few of my macros are taking quite a while to complete and I am looking for a way to track progress. I build a log file during most of my macro processes but I have not found a good way to report progress without pausing the process. Ex. MsgBox("Progress")
Any way to access the output window or even better the VS status bar?
I made a macro for Visual Studio 2005 which needed a form to choose between some options. I made that form from code and everything worked fine.
I think that you can do something similar. You can create a form with a progress bar and use that to track your progresses.
You could also use the visual studio designer to generate the code for you.
On long Visual C++ builds, it would be really helpful to hear some sort of (optional) sounds for such build/compile results as:
individual compile error
file compile success/failure
build success/failure
batch build success/failure
Does anyone know how to enable sounds for these kinds of build occurrences in Visual C++ (especially Visual C++ 2008 on Vista)?
CJM is almost right.
In VC++ 9 (Visual Studio 2008) Go to Control Panel's Sounds applet (Control Panel/Hardware and Sounds/Sounds in Vista).
Under the Sounds tab scroll to "Build Succeeded" under "Microsoft Visual Studio" and set a sound for this event.
If you have (or had) multiple VS on this PC (I have 6.0, 2003, 2005, and 2008) there may be multiple entries with names like "Microsoft Developer" or blanks - which I assume work in the older versions. I often end-up setting the wrong ones. It seems you'll have to close VS 2008 and reopen for this to take effect.
Someone mentioned this was broken/removed in VS 2005 - I noticed this as well.
Go to Start | Settings | Control Panel | Sounds, click the Sounds tab, and customize the entries under Microsoft Developer.
Another solution is to install the Visual Studio Power Toys. This includes a feature called 'Toast' that shows a notification in your system tray when a build has finished. You might see if this has options that would be useful for sound notification.
In VS2005, the sound subsystem wasn't working correctly, not sure it was fixed in 2008. Using macros, you COULD play sounds, like different ones for builds that succeeded, and builds that failed, however the person that I knew that did them was constantly crashing due to the macros failing.