About eight months ago, I spent time working on a solution for a gap in MSBuild VC++ support. When you currently build a VC++ solution with MSBuild, MSBuild is really executing vcbuild.exe to do the actual work. There are no cl and link tasks or any other C++ MSBuild tasks, and C++ projects still use the old VS project format instead of relying on MSBuild. Thus, I prototyped an application that could convert VC++ projects to MSBuild projects and created cl and link tasks.

 

Since then, this effort was abandoned in favor of MSBee. However, I've composed a document that describes the issues I discovered while prototyping and how you might go about building this tool. My hope is that some interested people in the community will continue this project to fill this gap in MSBuild compatibility.

 

The document is attached to this blog post; feel free to post additional questions.