josh's WebLog

i can't believe it's been over nine months since i've blogged anything. i guess i shouldn't be surprised, last time i blogged we had just finished work on beta 2 and now we're getting to that point for RTM ("release to manufacturing", otherwise known...

Todd asks, in comments to my last post, whether there is any way to migrate or save your settings (window layouts et al) in VS.NET between installations/machines/etc. he also asks if how the developers at microsoft handle this. unfortunately, the answer...

just a quick note today. it's been half a year since i last blogged and, sad to say, not much has changed. the most notable news is that Peter (Huene) has left the team (and the company). i can honestly say he was one of the best developers that i have...

Stephane asks where the "export makfile" in VS 2002/2003, and if it is coming back in whidbey (VS 2005). unfortunately the answer is that export makefile does not exist in any version of VS since 6.0 (98) and there aren't any plans to change...

many people have codebases that they don't have the luxury of building with the VC project build system. yet they may still want to use the Visual Studio environment to get intellisense on their code etc etc. unfortunately, the intellisense editor features...

it has been a while since i posted last. that's what i get for letting things get out of hand around here. we've been pushing hard towards getting the first beta of visual studio 2005 (whidbey) ready and that has been taking most of my time. that plus...

it has been a little while since my last post; hectic bug fixing seems to have been overfilling the brim of my days. i have a few moments of peace before the next onslaught begins, so i thought i would talk about "custom build steps" and "build events...

okay, let's talk about building c++ projects. several things go into building a project: a list of files, the tools that are run, the switches to set on those tools and how we know when to execute those tools. the files and the set of switches (properties...

Stephane makes some more good points in his last feedback. i have only one comment, which is that while everything he says is true, it ignores my point that these are simply not things we have designed for. we don't have the resources to do everything...

Stephane has responded with some cogent observations and questions, see the feedback to my response yesterday. let's see if i can (briefly) cover the issues he brings up one at a time: first off, the handling of managed references to activex controls...

picking up from where we left off, there are a couple of "special" macros: $(Inherit) and $(NoInherit). to understand what they are and how they work, you first need to understand how inheritance works with properties. earlier we looked at the property...

in feedback on my last post, Stephane asks about assembly references and shareable paths in csproj and vcproj files. c# projects in VS 2002 and 2003 store in the project file a path that is relativized to the project directory. this is called the...

"macros", in the context of the project system, refer to "$(name)" formatted variables that can be used in the project's properties. in VC 5 and 6 there was support for using these kind of macros in some properties. in VS.NET 2002 we extended the support...

it's great to see that i've already gotten some feedback! i'll go ahead an provide some brief comments now: Jerry and Jamie asked about msbuild support for VC in whidbey (the upcoming version of VS). i'll talk about this more in an upcoming entry...

my last entry talked about the files that are contained in a project. this entry is going to discuss the next important collection of items in the project: the configurations. a configuration is really nothing more than a collection of property values...

the first key to understanding the VC project/build system is understanding what we do with the source files in a project. each file in a VC project (foo.cpp, for instance) has a "tool" associated with it, based initially on the file's extension...

this being the first post in this blog, those are the obvious questions. who is easily answered ("josh shepard, a developer on the Visual C++ IDE's project/build system team"), what and why less so. the intention of this blog is to be a source...