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RE: Microsoft and IDE builds


From: Zachary Deretsky
Subject: RE: Microsoft and IDE builds
Date: Wed, 5 Sep 2001 13:35:52 -0700

MSVC has documentation in its help system under MSDN Library Visual Studio
6.0
I hate it intensely because it is cross-linked and is going in circles, but
with
patience and time you can fetch lots of info from there.

Apparently Microsoft wants you to use their IDE like a video game and learn
by
playing it. Our developers were forced to do it this way. Starting to use it
does
not take long and MSVS is very useful for browsing and debugging.

Our philosophy from the very beginning was to have uniform modules and a
batch
system which builds them together. Since it is impossible for everybody to
create
their projects interactively in the uniform way we used a script which would
create a template makefile for a project and then one would load this
makefile into
IDE and fill it in with source files.

The original top-level build system was written in perl. Microsoft
introduced .dsp
and .dsw files instead of makefiles. I believe, the format of these files is
not
published, but they are quite simple to sort out.

For unix we had a script which would parse .dsw and .dsp files and turn them
into
gnumake files and the top-level system was gnumake-based.

Now our files of reference are Conscript files and we use cons on all
platforms.
Compiler options are uniformly controlled, but could be modified in the
top-level
Construct for individual experiments. So full, partial and command-line
builds
are taken care of nicely by cons.

But the daily development and debugging of their modules people do in Visual
Studio
and here Greg comes to help. His DSPGenerator creates .dsp files which just
call
cons when you push "build" button in Visual Studio. So, interactive compiles
happen
exactly the same way as the batch compiles. The :S option in the rules makes
sure
that the correct source files are brought in when you click on an error
message.

I believe that Greg has implemented the cleanest possible way for Viasual
Studio
and cons to work together. I. e. minmal glue for Visual Studio to call cons.

I think Johan Holmberg is missing something when he wants
> a solution ... much "cleaner" than the"DSPGenerator.pl"
> with all its "print" statements, hardcoded values etc.

There are, of course, many "devil-is-in-the-details" facets.
I would suggest taking a small sample project, Greg's extensions and playing
with all this a little bit.

Zach.


> -----Original Message-----
> From: address@hidden [mailto:address@hidden
> Behalf Of Steven Knight
> Sent: Tuesday, September 04, 2001 1:38 PM
> To: address@hidden
> Subject: Microsoft and IDE builds
>
>
> Conspirators--
>
> Can someone suggest a good resource or reference (print or
> on-line) for
> the build portions of Microsoft Visual Studio (or C++)? And/or other
> integrated development environments, perhaps?
>
> After the recent mailing list discussion about how well Cons does or
> does not support Windows (by which I presume we really mean Visual
> Studio), I thought I'd try to educate myself about that environment,
> to see if that can help with future Cons development.  A quick leafing
> through various VC++ books at the local Border's didn't turn up much.
> They seemed to devote very few pages to build issues, which
> is probably
> reasonable if most people are content to just build software the way
> Microsoft wants them to.
>
> Any suggestions for good reading on how MSV[CS] handle
> software builds,
> and how other tools such as Cons do or do not fit into that?
>
>       --SK
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> address@hidden
> http://mail.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/cons-discuss
> Cons URL: http://www.dsmit.com/cons/




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