In the comments about a post I made a year ago about devenv /build ( here ), a person named Peter just a couple weeks ago made the following comment: When we use IDE to build a project, we have the file(s) checked-out, and IDE will build the changes (checked-out files), will command build do so? I.e...

Hi all -   So, as I mentioned in an earlier blog entry , Alex Kipman & Rajeev Goel are going to do a PDC presentation on MSBuild (the new build engine we’re including with Whidbey).   If you’re going to the PDC, be sure to check it out.   It’s Monday, Oct. 27...

Hi all -   More stuff has come online.  See here for a little blurb about MSBuild, which is what we're calling our cool new build engine that will ship along with Whidbey. -Chris

Greetings, all!   Microsoft has announced the broad outline of the material to be presented at the PDC 2003.   See here for the list of tracks & presentations.   Under the “Languages and Tools” section you’ll see a cryptic reference to “a new unified build...

Greetings, all!   In my entry about devenv /build , a reader named Toby mentions the pain of maintaining multiple configurations when you have a lot of them that are identical except for one flag.   He says:   In my work, I'll deal with several types of configurations: release...

Greetings, dear readers!   Today I want to talk about using devenv.exe to build a solution or project from the command line (as opposed to interactively inside the IDE).   For example, you can say “devenv /build debug myapp.sln” to do a debug build of myapp.sln.   Now, I have to admit...

Greetings, dear readers!   Today I want to talk about solution configurations and project configurations.   These are important concepts that are essential to understand if you’re trying to do complex coordination of builds using VS, esp. if you're using the DTE or devenv /build at the...

There's a news report about what MSFT disclosed at the VS Live! event.  See the link for info about some of the cool things we're doing in Whidbey (the next major release of VS) and Orcas (the release after that).  Whidbey is what most of the VS teams are spending most of their time on...

There's now free registration at the VSIP site  to become a VSIP ("Visual Studio Industy Partner"), which is the program whereby you can write a low-level package that integrates more deeply into Visual Studio than is possible as an add-in (or macro).  The VSIP program is great...

A reader named Martin makes a good point made about my earlier weblog entry about Watson crashes; he says we could offer a way to let users provide more information when a bug is difficult to reproduce.  Actually, we already do this in cases where we're having difficulty making progress...

My dear readers, I have a terrible admission to make.   But it's time to come clean with you.  The fact is, of our hundreds of thousands of users, a small number encounter crashing bugs in Visual Studio.   They are working happily along, and *boom* some terrible crash will occur.  ...

A reader named Uri commented on my July 15th entry about safe handling of untrusted solutions & projects.  He brings up some good points which I thought worth addressing. One thing he mentions is that often one needs to grab a whole sample project at a time and can't just grab snippests...

Greetings, my dear readers.   I wanted to offer some suggestions about how VS users can safely handle code obtained from other sources.   A combination of common sense and careful reading of the VS documentation would lead you to the same conclusions I’m laying out here, but I thought...

A person named Blair commented on one of my prior entries about using linked files.  They mention that the integration of a project's linked files with source code control has some limitations, esp. when you link to files outside the current project directory. I looked into this issue a bit...

Now, this feature could be described as more of a text editor feature than a project feature, and it's not owned by my team, but it's relevant & useful enough that I think it's worth mentioning here. With VS you can save a text file with an arbitrary language encoding (ANSI, Shift-JIS, Unicode...

Well, I'm back.  Had a great time in Minnesota, but alas, all good vacations must come to an end.  I have some reflections which I might share later, but right now I want to tell you about another highly useful feature which is so obscurely hidden that some of you may not realize it's there...

One little tip before I leave town.  A very useful but well-hidden feature is that of "linked files" within a VB or C# project.  This lets you point to a file without having it be copied into the same directory of your project.  You still get syntax coloring, intellisense, etc...