I have a build process (let's call it the "engine") that has been using a command line call to Visual Studio's devenv.exe to build a project. I have known for some time that VS is just building with MSBuild, so I finally got around to updating the engine to use MSBuild directly. However, I'm finding a strange anomaly with MSBuild.
For the sake of discussion, there's projects A, B, C, and D. Project A is the main project I'm building, a web app, that depends (through project references) on the other 3 projects. When built manually in VS, A\bin is populated with assemblies. When built in the engine with devenv.exe A\bin is again populated with the expected binaries. When built in the engine use MSBuild, A\bin contains nothing. However, B\Release\bin, C\Release\bin and D\Release\bin contain their binaries as they did using the former 2 build methods.
This happens with just a single project as well. The problem doesn't appear to be related to dependent projects.
I have attempted to explicitly set the MSBuild OutDir property, but it doesn't appear to have any affect.
I have run builds with diagnostic output on and can't see anything obvious (granted, there is a LOT there so it's possible I have yet to find something significant).
I've also been trying to figure out how to see the command line call to MSBuild that VS is making when run from devenv.exe but I can't seem to find it.
I have looked at several other SO posts (here and here) but they aren't the same problem.
Anyone have an idea of what this could be or where else I could look for an answer or more diagnostic information?
EDIT 1: The arguments pattern used for the call to MSBuild looks like this:
/nologo /target:Compile /property:Configuration=%%BUILDCONFIG%% /maxcpucount
/property:OutDir=%%OUTDIR%%\bin\ /verbosity:diag /detailedsummary "%%PROJPATH%%"
The lower half of that shows my attempt to force the output directory as well as the enhanced output to show more details of the process. Build engine code replaces with "%%TOKEN%%" items with the appropriate replacement values for the project being built.
EDIT 2: After more research and looking into suggested provided, I've decided to abandon the effort to use msbuild instead of devenv. It seems there is a lot more going on under the hood of devenv in preparation its own call to msbuild and I could likely break something else going on if I don't fully understand the entrance in msbuild. I did try to see if the call to msbuild from devenv is logged, but it doesn't seem to be. I've considered building a dummy msbuild app to just dump the command going into it and temporarily swap out the actual msbuild to generate this diagnostic information, but that's more effort than it's worth at this point. The performance gain isn't so great that it's worth pursuing further for now.
I would look at the Output path on the build tab of your project properties. There are more than few differences when using MSBuild and when using Visual Studio (Even from the command line). It could be you have A configured differently than B,C,D and synching A to the rest will make it work. Also, if you plan to build the projects individually, not as a solution make sure you don't use Solution Level macros that won't be available to the project file on it own.
You are supposed to set OutputPath instead of OutputDir.
Since you already used /verbosity:diag, why not redirect the output to a text file and carefully analyze where csc.exe (or another compiler in use) stores the binaries? That's quite simple and informative for you to learn how MSBuild works under the hood.
Hopefully this isn't a duplicate. I tried to search for an answer to my question, but the word 'macro' just has too many different applications to filter the search results very effectively.
Anyway, I recently noticed in another Visual C++ (VS2010) project that custom macros were used to set up VC++ directories (include, lib) or link libraries. Something like this: "libjpeg-$(JPEG_LIB_VERSION)-static.lib", etc.
How does one go about doing that? I can't remember in what project I saw that technique, so I haven't been able to find it again to investigate, but this would be very useful when building against local builds or particular versions of widely-distributed software (say, Boost, for instance).
There's this (Visual C++ Express and setting env variables solution wide), which I suppose kinda-sorta answers the question, but not really.
The macro being used may be an environment variable, or it may indeed be a custom macro.
If it is an environment variable, you could follow the documentation as mentioned in this MSDN document How to: Use Environment Variables in a Build
However, if it is not an environment variable and you want to create your own, there is another MSDN document for that How to: Add New Property Sheets to C++ Projects
For additional references on creating a custom macro, please see How to add environmental variable to VS solution (.sln )
For additional references on using an environment, please see Macros/Environment variable in .sln and .vcproj files for Visual studio
I know I will miss so much of Visual Studio but I am getting really sick of it crashing all the time and being slow, PLUS it is always changing things in my repository that I don't want to change, so I want to just edit with Notepad++. However, now I will have to load up VS just to build things. Is there a way I can build from command line and make a script for it and what not? Will it show the compile errors?
Please don't try to troubleshoot VS for me, I am just asking what is in the question and the rest was just given for context and so nobody was like 'Y U NO RIKE VIZAL STUDIA?'.
build: C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v4.0.30319\MSBuild.exe "PATH TO YOUR SOLUTION FILE"
help: C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v4.0.30319\MSBuild.exe /help
What you need is directly calling csc.exe, the C# compiler (which is called by the build system of Visual Studio, anyways). If you ever worked with GCC, it is quite similar except that options are passed Windows-style with / signs instead of -- and there are no object files or additional linking. The MSDN library has documentation: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/78f4aasd.aspx.
Generally, you'd need something like:
csc /target:exe /out:Something.exe *.cs
plus any /reference's you would add in Visual Studio.
If your project is large, it may be uncomfortable to maintain a .bat file to do the compilation, so a build tool like NAnt may be needed, which is quite similar to the Ant used for Java.
This is of course if you want to eliminate Visual Studio entirely. Otherwise, Snowbear's solution of invoking MSBuild.exe will be just as fine.
I've inherited some C99 code that I'm planing on reusing in a C++-centric solution. Unfortunately, even Microsoft's latest compiler has virtually no support for non-trivial C99 features.
The code in question has been tested to death and I'd rather not go through the trouble of rewriting it in C++. This means that in order for me to reuse the code verbatim I'll have to rely on a conforming 3rd-party compiler.
After looking around, it appears that the nicest way for me to integrate this code is by adding a "Makefile Project" to my solution. Only one problem. It seems like it is now my responsibility to keep the "Build Command Line" property synchronized with the files that I add to the project through Visual Studio.
At first glance, I couldn't find a way to get a list of files in my project through the usual Visual Studio $()-style macros. I could always write a shell script that would enumerate *.c files in my source tree and pass their paths to the 3rd-party compiler. However, I kind of expected that Visual Studio would do at least that part of the work for me since it already has this information in the relevant *.vc[x]proj file.
It is very unlikely that I'll need to add any new source files to this project, but still, manual synchronization (i.e., without a script) of this sort seems rather fragile to me.
What are my options besides writing a helper script?
From Hans Passant:
"Makefile project" means what it says,
there needs to be another 'agent'
that's responsible for the
dependencies. Like a make file. Rule
files can help you select another
build tool but that's kinda broken
right now in VS2010. Leverage the
original tool that built this C99
code, run it from the makefile
project.
I know the ideal way to build projects is without requiring IDE based project files, since it theoretically causes all sort of trouble with automation and what not. But I've yet to work on a project that compiles on Windows that doesn't depend on the VisualStudio project (Ok, obviously some Open Source stuff gets done with Cygwin, but I'm being general here).
On the other hand if we just use VS to run a makefile, we loose all the benefits of the compile options window, and it becomes a pain to maintain the external makefile.
So how do people that use VS actually handle external makefiles? I have yet to find a painless system to do this...
Or in reality most people don't do this, although its preached as good practice?
Take a look at MSBuild!
MSBuild can work with the sln/csproj files from VS, so for simple projects you can just call them directly.
if you need more control, wrap the projects in your own build process, add your own tasks etc. - it is very extensible!
(I wanted to add a sample but this edior totally messed up the XML... sorry)
Ideally perhaps, in practice no.
Makefiles would be my preference as the build master, however, the developers spend all their time inside the visual studio IDE and when they make a change, it's to the vcproj file, not the makefile. So if I'm doing the global builds with makefiles, it's too easily put out of synch with the project/solution files in play by 8 or 10 others.
The only way I can stay in step with the whole team is to run devenv.exe on the solution files directly in my build process scripts.
There are very few makefiles in my builds, where there are they are in the pre-build or custom build sections or a separate utility project.
One possibility is to use CMake - you describe with a script how you project is to be built, and CMake generates the Visual Studio solution/project files for you.
And if you need to build your project from the command line, or in a continuous integration tool, you use CMake to generate a Makefile for NMake.
And if you project is a cross-platform one - you can run CMake to generate the makefiles for the toolchain of your choice.
A simple CMake script looks like this:
project(hello)
add_executable(hello hello.cpp)
Compare these two lines with a makefile or the way you setup a simple project in your favorite IDE.
In a nutshell CMake does not only cross-platform-enables your project it also makes it cross-IDE. If you like to just test your project with eclipse or KDevelop, or codeblocks, just run CMake to generate the corresponding project files.
Well, in practice it is no always so easy, but the CMake idea just rocks.
For example, if you consider using CMake with Visual Studio there is some tweaking required to obtain the familiar VS project feeling, main obstacle is to organize your header and source files, but it is possible - check the CMake wiki (and by writting a short script you might even simplify this task).
We use a NAnt script, which at the compile step calls MSBuild. Using NAnt allows us to perform both pre- and post-build tasks, such as setting version numbers to match source control revision numbers, collating code coverage information, assembling and zipping deployment sources. But still, at the heart of it, it's MSBuild that's actually doing the compiling.
You can integrate a NAnt build as a custom tool into the IDE, so that it can be used both on a build or continuous integration server and by the developers in the same way.
Personally, I use Rake to call msbuild on my solution or project. For regular development I use the IDE and all the benefits that provides.
Rake is set up so that I can just compile, compile and run tests or compile run tests and create deployable artifacts.
Once you have a build script it is really easy to start doing things like setting up continuous integration and using it to automate deployment.
You can also use most build tools from within the IDE if you follow these steps to set it up.
We use the devenv.exe (same exe that launches the IDE) to build our projects from the build scripts (or the command line). When specifying the /Build option the IDE is not displayed and everything is written back to the console (or the log file if you specify the /Out option)
See http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/xee0c8y7(VS.80).aspx for more information
Example:
devenv.exe [solution-file-name] /Build [project-name] /Rebuild "Release|Win32" /Out solution.log
where "Release|Win32" is the configuration as defined in the solution and solution.log is the file that gets the compiler output (which is quite handy when you need to figure out what went wrong in the compile)
We have a program that parses the vcproj files and generates makefile fragments from that. (These include the list of files and the #defines, and there is some limited support for custom build steps.) These fragments are then included by a master makefile which does the usual GNU make stuff.
(This is all for one of the systems we target; its tools have no native support for Visual Studio.)
This didn't require a huge amount of work. A day to set it up, then maybe a day or two in total to beat out some problems that weren't obvious immediately. And it works fairly well: the compiler settings are controlled by the master makefile (no more fiddling with those tiny text boxes), and yet anybody can add new files and defines to the build in the usual way.
That said, the combinatorical problems inherent to Visual Studio's treatment of build configurations remain.
Why would you want to have project that "compiles on Windows that doesn't depend on the VisualStudio project"? You already have a solution file - you can just use it with console build.
I'd advise you to use msbuild with conjunction with makefile, nant or even simple batch file if your build system is not as convoluted as ours...
Is there something I'm missing?
How about this code?
public TRunner CleanOutput()
{
ScriptExecutionEnvironment.LogTaskStarted("Cleaning solution outputs");
solution.ForEachProject(
delegate (VSProjectInfo projectInfo)
{
string projectOutputPath = GetProjectOutputPath(projectInfo.ProjectName);
if (projectOutputPath == null)
return;
projectOutputPath = Path.Combine(projectInfo.ProjectDirectoryPath, projectOutputPath);
DeleteDirectory(projectOutputPath, false);
string projectObjPath = String.Format(
CultureInfo.InvariantCulture,
#"{0}\obj\{1}",
projectInfo.ProjectName,
buildConfiguration);
projectObjPath = Path.Combine(productRootDir, projectObjPath);
DeleteDirectory(projectObjPath, false);
});
ScriptExecutionEnvironment.LogTaskFinished();
return ReturnThisTRunner();
}
public TRunner CompileSolution()
{
ScriptExecutionEnvironment.LogTaskStarted ("Compiling the solution");
ProgramRunner
.AddArgument(MakePathFromRootDir(productId) + ".sln")
.AddArgument("/p:Configuration={0}", buildConfiguration)
.AddArgument("/p:Platform=Any CPU")
.AddArgument("/consoleloggerparameters:NoSummary")
.Run(#"C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v3.5\msbuild.exe");
ScriptExecutionEnvironment.LogTaskFinished ();
return ReturnThisTRunner ();
}
You can find the rest of it here: http://code.google.com/p/projectpilot/source/browse/trunk/Flubu/Builds/BuildRunner.cs
I haven't tried it myself yet, but Microsoft has a Make implementation called NMake which seems to have a Visual Studio integration:
NMake
Creating NMake Projects
Visual Studio since VS2005, uses "msbuild" to define and run builds. When you fiddle with project settings in the Visual Studio designer - let's say you turn XML doc generation on or off, or you add a new dependency, or you add a new project or Assembly reference - Visual Studio will update the .csproj (or .vbproj, etc) file, which is an msbuild file.
Like Java's ant or Nant before it, msbuild uses an XML schema to describe the project and build. It is run from VS when you do a "F6" build, and you can also run it from the command line, without ever opening VS or running devenv.exe.
So, use the VS tool for development and command-line msbuild for automated builds - same build, and same project structure.