One step forward, Two steps forward

re: One step forward, Two steps forward

Vish — Sat, 04 Jun 2005 12:57:52 GMT

I have a hand in our company build system and just wanted to understand a little bit about point 3. Am I correct in saying you were previously using lines of "devenv /build <project>" for your old build system? And now with the switch to MSBuild you get faster compilations and improved incremental builds, how comes devenv isn't of comparible speed (if my first assumption is correct). One more thing, I recall sometime ago there was talk about the C++ compiler being able to carry out parallel builds (or perhaps it was the MSBuild system that would be able to do this), will this functionality be able in the RTM of Whidbey?

re: One step forward, Two steps forward

CyrusN — Sat, 04 Jun 2005 13:39:50 GMT

"I have a hand in our company build system and just wanted to understand a little bit about point 3. Am I correct in saying you were previously using lines of "devenv /build <project>" for your old build system?"

No. Sorry that i wasn't clear. We actually had two build systems. One was the "build.exe" build process which was reponsible for building all of Visual Studio. The other was that we also had a .vcproj solution that we used to organize and compile our C++ sources ourselves. The .vcproj was great because it gave us intellisense and incremental linking and fast rebuilds, but it wasn't consumed by the command line build. The command line build system worked, but it didn't give us all of those benefits.

Now we just have one system, and it's the same whether or not it's used from the command line or VS.

"And now with the switch to MSBuild you get faster compilations and improved incremental builds, how comes devenv isn't of comparible speed (if my first assumption is correct)."

It is :)
VS and the command line are now identical. "building" in VS just spawns MSBuild, so it does the exact same work at spawning msbuild from teh command line.

"One more thing, I recall sometime ago there was talk about the C++ compiler being able to carry out parallel builds (or perhaps it was the MSBuild system that would be able to do this), will this functionality be able in the RTM of Whidbey?"

I have heard similar things but i don't know what the actual story is here.

IIRC, MSBuild doesn't support parallel builds in Whidbey, but has it on it's plate for the future.

re: One step forward, Two steps forward

Luc Cluitmans — Sun, 05 Jun 2005 11:07:11 GMT

Quote: "We've wanted to do this for quite a long time but we never had the time to do a full migration and we also kept on running into a few issues that kept causing problems."

So, can you tell us a bit more about what those 'issues' that you bumped into were? Will your solution in the end result in new features for us all in MsBuild?

re: One step forward, Two steps forward

CyrusN — Sun, 05 Jun 2005 21:50:45 GMT

Luc: "So, can you tell us a bit more about what those 'issues' that you bumped into were? Will your solution in the end result in new features for us all in MsBuild?"

They were, in general, pretty minor things. For example, we would use it's regexp capabilities to say: "include all .cpp files from all subdirectories", however, after you opened the project file in VS then the regexp would be expanded out to all files that matches and it would get replaces with that list. Thus the regexp would be lost and the project wouldn't pick up any new files added to the directory.

re: One step forward, Two steps forward

CyrusN — Sun, 05 Jun 2005 21:54:31 GMT

Luc: Plus, MSBuild is getting used to build more and more of the VS source tree (With many teams already using it). The team wants to make sure that they can really handle the most complicated of tasks, and building all of VS is a great test of that.

So they're very responsive to helping out individual teams to be able to effectively use MSBuild for their own projects. If there and any problems, or needed functionality, then it's very likely that it will soon be in an upcoming build :)

Hopefully, after being able to support the tons of teams inside VS all of which build differently, they'll be able to handle your system!

re: One step forward, Two steps forward

Michael Kariv — Mon, 06 Jun 2005 20:27:58 GMT

I am surprised to learn msbuild and devenv command line are identical. I keep using devenv with vs2005 b2 because of the bug in msbuild that doest work correctly with the post build event macros, as of b2.
I however noticed that when compiling large solutions the visible progress indicator bar appears and says it is building the intellisense base. Does msbuild do it too? I'd be gravely disappointed.

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