Does anyone have experience using makefiles for Visual Studio C++ builds (under VS 2005) as opposed to using the project/solution setup. For us, the way that the project/solutions work is not intuitive and leads to configuruation explosion when you are trying to tweak builds with specific compile time flags.
Under Unix, it's pretty easy to set up a makefile that has its default options overridden by user settings (or other configuration setting). But doing these types of things seems difficult in Visual Studio.
By way of example, we have a project that needs to get build for 3 different platforms. Each platform might have several configurations (for example debug, release, and several others). One of my goals on a newly formed project is to have a solution that can have all platform build living together, which makes building and testing code changes easier since you aren't having to open 3 different solutions just to test your code. But visual studio will require 3 * (number of base configurations) configurations. i.e. PC Debug, X360 Debug, PS3 Debug, etc.
It seems like a makefile solution is much better here. Wrapped with some basic batchfiles or scripts, it would be easy to keep the configuration explotion to a minimum and only maintain a small set of files for all of the different builds that we have to do.
However, I have no experience with makefiles under visual studio and would like to know if others have experiences or issues that they can share.
Thanks.
(post edited to mention that these are C++ builds)
I've found some benefits to makefiles with large projects, mainly related to unifying the location of the project settings. It's somewhat easier to manage the list of source files, include paths, preprocessor defines and so on, if they're all in a makefile or other build config file. With multiple configurations, adding an include path means you need to make sure you update every config manually through Visual Studio's fiddly project properties, which can get pretty tedious as a project grows in size.
Projects which use a lot of custom build tools can be easier to manage too, such as if you need to compile pixel / vertex shaders, or code in other languages without native VS support.
You'll still need to have various different project configurations however, since you'll need to differentiate the invocation of the build tool for each config (e.g. passing in different command line options to make).
Immediate downsides that spring to mind:
Slower builds: VS isn't particularly quick at invoking external tools, or even working out whether it needs to build a project in the first place.
Awkward inter-project dependencies: It's fiddly to set up so that a dependee causes the base project to build, and fiddlier to make sure that they get built in the right order. I've had some success getting SCons to do this, but it's always a challenge to get working well.
Loss of some useful IDE features: Edit & Continue being the main one!
In short, you'll spend less time managing your project configurations, but more time coaxing Visual Studio to work properly with it.
Visual studio is being built on top of the MSBuild configurations files. You can consider *proj and *sln files as makefiles. They allow you to fully customize build process.
While it's technically possible, it's not a very friendly solution within Visual Studio. It will be fighting you the entire time.
I recommend you take a look at NAnt. It's a very robust build system where you can do basically anything you need to.
Our NAnt script does this on every build:
Migrate the database to the latest version
Generate C# entities off of the database
Compile every project in our "master" solution
Run all unit tests
Run all integration tests
Additionally, our build server leverages this and adds 1 more task, which is generating Sandcastle documentation.
If you don't like XML, you might also take a look at Rake (ruby), Bake/BooBuildSystem (Boo), or Psake (PowerShell)
You can use nant to build the projects individually thus replacing the solution and have 1 coding solution and no build solutions.
1 thing to keep in mind, is that the solution and csproj files from vs 2005 and up are msbuild scripts. So if you get acquainted with msbuild you might be able to wield the existing files, to make vs easier, and to make your deployment easier.
We have a similar set up as the one you are describing. We support at least 3 different platforms, so the we found that using CMake to mange the different Visual Studio solutions. Set up can be a bit painful, but it pretty much boils down to reading the docs and a couple of tutorials. You should be able to do virtually everything you can do by going to the properties of the projects and the solution.
Not sure if you can have all three platforms builds living together in the same solution, but you can use CruiseControl to take care of your builds, and running your testing scripts as often as needed.
Related
I want to start a cross-platform C++ project with VisualStudio 2019.
After some research I found two possible ways:
CMake
Tutorial: Create C++ cross-platform projects in Visual Studio
Create and configure a Linux CMake project
CMake is pretty common for cross-platform projects, but I haven't done much with it and it feels like you need to put in much effort to make it run as you want to. But you have a huge amount of possibilities to configure it. This SO questions also recommends CMake, but says that there are other ways.
VS Shared Project
Shared Project : An Impressive Feature of Visual Studio 2015
Cross-platform code sharing with Visual C++
If you use cross-platform code sharing in VS you have several projects in your solution (one for each platform) and at least one shared project, which includes your source + header files. The platform specific projects include all the configuration settings and the program entry point. The shared code can be used from each project as if it is in the project.
All the configuration is possible in VS. It looks less complex but with limited possibilities.
Question
Both ways look like they would fit my needs, but I haven't found a comparison between them. I already coded running examples for both of them, but those small code bases haven't given me the insight I need.
What are the pro's and con's of those two ways? Considering attributes like build-speed, flexibility, time to learn/master/market, VS feature support, unit testing, continuous integration, ...
Take a look at Premake. You can generate Makefiles and VS project from simple lua configurations. Not a lot of projects use premake but my experience so far has been positive.
I'm building a solution containing .NET Standard 2.0 and .NET Core 2.0 projects (C# and F#) in VS2019 (16.1.1). If I build multiple times without changes the second and subsequent builds should say "Build: 0 succeeded, 0 failed, X up-to-date", but it sometimes rebuilds some projects every time. How do I find out exactly why?
There are many SO questions and blog posts about this, most of them suggesting setting the build log verbosity to "Diagnostic" and looking for "not up to date". I've done that and the string is not found, nor is "not up-to-date" (but "up-to-date" occurs many times). So this appears to have changed in VS2019. I also know about the U2DCheckVerbosity registry setting, but that's only for .NET Framework. Reading through the build log output is unrealistic, as it's over 360 thousands lines, so I need to know what to search for.
Please note, I'm not looking for guesses as to what the problem might be - I'm looking for a way to get VS/the compiler to tell me.
I'm looking for a way to get VS/the compiler to tell me. (For VS2019)
It's hard to reproduce same issue so I'm not sure about the cause of your issue. But as for what you're asking is the way to find up-to-date related info in Output window, maybe you can check the Up To Data Checks option for .net core.
Go Tools=>Options=>Projects and Solutions=>.net core=>Up To Data Checks. Make sure you've checked the Don't call MSBuild if a project appears to be up-to-date. Then change the Logging Level to Info or Verbose.(Choose the suitable level according to your needs)
For the normal .net framework projects or C++ projects, the build output verbosity in build and run would be of great help. But when trying to find the reason why VS consider one .net core or .net standard project is out-of-date, I think we can try this option since its output is more clear.
E.g: (One .net Core project which depends on the Standard project with Info level .net core Up-To-Date Check):
And if you have too many projects in one solution, I suggest you build one project one time instead of build the whole solution so you can locate the cause of the rebuild more easily.
VS writes a file called NETCoreApp,Version=v2.0.AssemblyAttributes.cs into temp folder. If you build several .net core projects, the file gets changed by the other project and your VS thinks the old project is modified and builds it.
Move the generated files into the project to reduce the builds:
<PropertyGroup>
<TargetFrameworkMonikerAssemblyAttributesFileClean>False</TargetFrameworkMonikerAssemblyAttributesFileClean>
<TargetFrameworkMonikerAssemblyAttributesPath>$(MSBuildThisFileDirectory)SharedAssemblyAttributes.cs</TargetFrameworkMonikerAssemblyAttributesPath>
</PropertyGroup>
In VS2019 the option to control logging is:
The default is "None", but honestly "Minimal" is a good setting in general. When set to that level, only a single line is output per project, and only if that project is not up-to-date. That line will explain exactly why the project is considered out-of-date.
It's worth remembering that this is Visual Studio's up-to-date check, which it uses to quickly assess project state and avoid the comparatively expensive call to MSBuild. It is possible, with exotic project configurations, that VS determines your project needs building, but MSBuild doesn't actually build. This is rare, but can be worth understanding if you're debugging issues here.
The problem:
I'm writing an SDK that is primarily C++. The source code will be licensed to developers who pay for it, and the output libraries and include headers will be free for public usage. The SDK will target a plethora of platforms including Windows, Xbox, Playstation, Android, iOS, Mac OS X, and Linux. I'm a kind of guy who mostly likes Visual Studio and usually develops software using Windows machines. In the last few years, Visual Studio has made this quite a lot easier than it used to, where I have a mostly clear path to target all the previously mentioned platforms using a Visual Studio set of project files as the source of truth that brings all my source code files together... except for Mac OS X, unfortunately. Visual Studio is able to build executable code for iOS and Linux by remotely interfacing with a Mac or Linux box respectively for compilation and debugging, which is really quite cool, but for some reason Mac OS X as a target is left out here. Additionally I'm well aware that there are plenty of other professional developers out there that don't write code on Windows machines, nor do they have any interest in buying a commercial license for Visual Studio.
The question:
Since C++ still does not yet have a build system standard, and may not ever, how do I maintain a single source of truth that maintains the build configurations for all my source files targeting so many different platforms while simultaneously minimizing the barrier to entry of supporting software developer clients who need to build, run, and debug my source code?
Possible answers I'm aware of:
A) Visual Studio projects remain the source of truth from which any other C++ project types (such as Android Studio, XCode, and .make files) are derived. I'm aware of tools that can convert VS to .make and the like, but haven't actually tried them yet (my source code base is starting to get somewhat large already). Or I could just bite the bullet and write them by hand and try to keep them all in sync.
B) CMake. Sigh. So frustrating that it's very popular, and seems to exactly solve my issues, but it has its own set of problems that seem to be deal-breakers. For starters, once you go in on CMake, you pretty much can't come back. Using Visual Studio and property sheets, I've been able to tweak my build configurations with properties that are mostly inherited and rarely duplicated across projects and configurations. As far as I can see, CMake doesn't care about respecting such things, and for common properties, it just duplicates them on all vcxproj files. To make matters worse, all file paths it generates in the output projects are absolute, not relative, and to top it all off, it forces anyone else who builds your code to use CMake, disallowing distribution of the project build files it creates without it. Also, does this even work for game consoles? Last I checked I couldn't find a reasonable way of supporting them without hacking the source code.
C) Roll my own script that's similar to CMake, but allows redistribution of its output projects, and supports all the platforms I need. It goes without saying that this would consume a lot of dev time.
Any other options I'm missing here? Your input is greatly appreciated.
I agree with the comments from #Scheff and #arrowd. Use CMake. I have built and deployed software to multiple platforms and CMake is the best, though not perfect, solution I have found for building C++ code.
I have not had to hack the cmake code to get it to work on various platforms.
Do not worry about properties being duplicated in vcxproj files. With CMake the build language is in the CMakeLists.txt file(s). The vcxproj files are generated code. As long as you are do not have redundant cmake logic, you should not care about replicated properties in the generated vcxproj files. Similarly, you should not care that the generated vcxproj files have absolute paths; you do not reuse the vcxproj files you reuse the CMakeLists.txt files and regenerate vcxproj files for each new platform or build.
Use the top-level CMakeLists.txt to define the properties that are common to all targets. Then in individual target(s) CMakeLists.txt files use target properties to tweak builds of specific targets. In my experience the replication of properties in the generated files helps because they make the builds more consistent; I am able to minimize replication in the source CMake logic.
Various IDEs (VS 2017, CLion, QtCreator) can use cmake based projects directly.
There is nothing cmake specific about the generated artifacts. The headers, libraries (and dlls), and executables of our SDK are standalone artifacts. Yes, cmake can make it easier for your SDK users but using CMake in your SDK will not force your customers to use CMake.
Have you tried CMake and not been able to use it? Or are you looking for something better? There are certainly multiple C++ build systems, but despite its shortcomings I believe CMake is the best one available right now.
I'm on a BizTalk 2013 solution and I'm trying to grow into automated testing. However, when I try to run my tests after changing only the test project, or even just run the tests after changing nothing anywhere, I'm stuck building the same amount of projects that I build when I invoke a full rebuild on the project being tested. This eats up an enormous amount of time, and it's a death sentence for my ability to sell future investments into this type of thing.
Is this is a known deficiency with BizTalk, or with its interaction with MSBuild? Is it a known pitfall that I can repair on my end?
EDIT: After reviewing the "possible duplicate" thread, I believe this question to be similar, but distinct. The explanation from the thread highlights the mechanics by which MSBuild determines that a rebuild is necessary, but MSBuild is widely-used technology across all projects in Visual Studio and can differ significantly by project type based on that project type's specific targets import. I've edited the question title to reflect that I want to learn how to prevent this for BizTalk solutions rather than simply asking why it's happening (although knowing why is always helpful).
So, what you're seeing is not a problem with BizTalk (because BizTalk is perfect and wonderful and never has any problems ever...:).
It's actually a behavior of Visual Studio. To note, BizTalk Projects are just specialized c# Projects.
The best workaround, which I do all the time, is to uncheck the Build and Deploy options for Projects I'm not actively working with in the Solution Configuration. If the Project is not checked for Build, it will not build even when you choose Rebuild Solution.
One possible solution would be to reference not the projects, but the DLL files which are the result of the same - already compiled and built - projects.
This way, when building your test project, it would be built against these existing assemblies and hence would not take the time to rebuild those.
You have to make sure however that these DLLs are updated whenever the project behind them also updates. You could do this by rebuilding them, whenever necessary, in a separate Visual Studio instance.
It takes some practice and thinking to make sure you are building against the latest version, but it WILL save you a lot of time.
I've noticed this as well. Turning on diagnostic output on MSBuild, it turned out that the project settings .user files were being modified after the .pdb files. I've tried several ways of resolving this, including changing the modify date on the pdb file, setting the .user file to readonly, removing (renaming) the .user file, etc.
Unfortunately, the build task for BizTalk will overwrite/recreate/create new .user file after every build, and I haven't come up with a way to convince MSBuild that that it can just ignore the .user file being created as new. Due to that, I'd go with one of the other suggestions here.
Even creating an exclusive lock on the file so that MSBuild can't update it causes a rebuild, since then MSBuild thinks the build is dirty ("Project 'Schemas' is not up to date. Project dirty in MSBuild.")
For past 4 years, I have been programming with Eclipse (for Java), and Visual Studio Express (for C#). The IDEs mentioned always seemed to provide every facility a programmer might ask for (related to programming, of course).
Lately I have been hearing about something called "build tools". I heard they're used almost in all kind of real world development. What are they exactly? What problems are they designed to solve? How come I never needed them in past four years? Are they kind of command-line stripped down IDEs?
What are build tools?
Build tools are programs that automate the creation of executable
applications from source code (e.g., .apk for an Android app). Building
incorporates compiling,linking and packaging the code into a usable or
executable form.
Basically build automation is the act of scripting or automating a
wide variety of tasks that software developers do in their day-to-day
activities like:
Downloading dependencies.
Compiling source code into binary code.
Packaging that binary code.
Running tests.
Deployment to production systems.
Why do we use build tools or build automation?
In small projects, developers will often manually invoke the build
process. This is not practical for larger projects, where it is very
hard to keep track of what needs to be built, in what sequence and
what dependencies there are in the building process. Using an
automation tool allows the build process to be more consistent.
Various build tools available(Naming only few):
For java - Ant,Maven,Gradle.
For .NET framework - NAnt
c# - MsBuild.
For further reading you can refer following links:
1.Build automation
2.List of build automation software
Thanks.
Build tools are tools to manage and organize your builds, and are very important in environments where there are many projects, especially if they are inter-connected. They serve to make sure that where various people are working on various projects, they don't break anything. And to make sure that when you make your changes, they don't break anything either.
The reason you have not heard of them before is that you have not been working in a commercial environment before. There is a whole lot of stuff that you have probably not encountered that you will within a commercial environments, especially if you work in software houses.
As others have said, you have been using them, however, you have not had to consider them, because you have probably been working in a different way to the usual commercial way of working.
Build tools are usually run on the command line, either inside an IDE or completely separate from it.
The idea is to separate the work of compiling and packaging your code from creation, debugging, etc.
A build tool can be run on the command or inside an IDE, both triggered by you. They can also be used by continuous integration tools after checking your code out of a repository and onto a clean build machine.
make was an early command tool used in *nix environments for building C/C++.
As a Java developer, the most popular build tools are Ant and Maven. Both can be run in IDEs like IntelliJ or Eclipse or NetBeans. They can also be used by continuous integration tools like Cruise Control or Hudson.
Build tools are generally to transform source code into binaries - it organize source code, set compile flags, manage dependencies... some of them also integrate with running unit test, doing static analysis, a generating documentation.
Eclipse or Visual Studio are also build systems (but more of an IDE), and for visual studio it is the underlying msbuild to parse visual studio project files under the hood.
The origin of all build systems seems like the famous 'make'.
There are build systems for different languages:
C++: make, cmake, premake
Java: ant+ivy, maven, gradle
C#: msbuild
Usually, build systems either using a propriety domain specific language (make, cmake), or xml (ant, maven, msbuild) to specify a build. The current trend is using a real scripting language to write build script, like lua for premake, and groovy for gradle, the advantage of using a scripting is it is much more flexible, and also allows you the to come up with a set of standard APIs(as build DSL).
These are different types of processes by which you can get your builds done.
1. Continuous Integration build: In this mainly developers check-in their code and right after their check-in a build initiates for building of the recent changes so we should know whether the changes done by the developer has worked or not right after the check-in is done. This is preferred for smaller projects or components of the projects. In case where multiple teams are associated with the project or there are a large no. of developers working on the same project this scenario becomes difficult to handle as if there are 'n' no. of check-in’s and the build fails at certain points it becomes highly difficult to trace whether all the breakage has occurred because of one issue or with multiple issues so if the older issues are not addressed properly than it becomes very difficult to trace down the later defects that occurred after that change. The main benefit of these builds is that we get to know whether a particular check-in is successful or not.
2. Gated check-in builds: In this type of check in a build is initiated right after the check in is done keeping the changes in a shelve sets. In this case if the build succeeds than the shelve-set check-in gets committed otherwise it will not be committed to the Team Foundation Server. This gives a slightly better picture from the continuous integration build as only the successful check-in's are allowed to get committed.
3. Nightly builds: This is also referred as Scheduled builds. In this case we schedule the builds to run for a specific time in order to build the changes. All the previous uncommitted changes from the last build are built during this build process. This is practiced when we want to check in multiple times but do not want a build every time we check in our code so we can have a fixed time or period in which we can initiate the build for building of the checked-in code.
The more details about these builds can be found at the below location.
Gated-check in Builds
Continuous Integration Builds
Nightly Builds
Build Process is a Process of compiling your source code for any errors using some build tools and creating builds(which are executable versions of the project). We(mainly developers) do some modifications in the source code and check-in that code for the build process to happen. After the build process it gives two results :
1. Either build PASSES and you get an executable version of your project(Build is ready).
2. It fails and you get certain errors and build is not created.
There are different types of build process like :
1. Nightly Build
2. gated Build
3. Continuous integration build etc.
Build tools help and automates the process of creating builds.
*So in Short Build is a Version of Software in pre-release format used by the Developer or Development team to gain confidence for the final result of their Product by continuously monitoring their Product and solving any issues early during the development process.*
You have been using them - IDE is a build tool. For the command line you can use things like make.
People use command line tools for things like a nightly build - so in the morning with a hangover the programmer has realised that the code that he has been fiddling with with the latest builds of the libraries does not work!
"...it is very hard to keep track of what needs to be built" - Build tools does not help with that all. You need to know what you want to build. (Quoted from Ritesh Gun's answer)
"I heard they're used almost in all kind of real-world development" - For some reason, software developers like to work in large companies. They seem to have more unclear work directives for every individual working there.
"How come I never needed them in past four years". Probably because you are a skilled programmer.
Pseudo, meta. I think build tools do not provide any really real benefit at all. It is just there to add a sense of security arising from bad company practices, lack of direction - bad software architectural leadership leading to bad actual knowledge of the project. You should never have to use build tools(for testing) in your project. To do random testing with a lack of knowledge of the software project does not give any sort of help at all.
You should never ever add something to a project without knowing it's purpose, and how it will work with the other components. Components can be functional separate, but not work together. (This is the responsibility of the software architect I assume).
What if 4-5 components are added into the project. You add a 6th component. Together with the first added component, it might screw up everything. No automatic would help to detect that.
There is no shortcut other than to think think think.
Then there is the auto download from repositories. Why would you ever want to do that? You need to know what you download, what you add to the project. How do you detect changes in versions of the repositories? You need to know. You can't "auto" anything.
What if we were to test bicycles and baby transports blindfolded with a stick and just randomly hit around with it. That seems to be the idea of build tool testing.
I'm sorry there are no shortcut
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method
and
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analysis