February 2004 - Posts

• understanding the VC project system part V: building, tools and dependencies

  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) Read More... Posted Friday, February 13, 2004 6:39 PM by josh_ | 2 Comments

• feedback loop

  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, Read More... Posted Wednesday, February 11, 2004 6:55 PM by josh_ | 0 Comments

• feedback on Stephane's comments: activex controls, references, deployment

  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 Read More... Posted Tuesday, February 10, 2004 5:33 PM by josh_ | 1 Comments

• understanding the VC project system part IV: properties and property inheritance

  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 Read More... Posted Monday, February 09, 2004 6:25 PM by josh_ | 2 Comments

• feedback: assembly references and paths

  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 'hint Read More... Posted Monday, February 09, 2004 1:14 PM by josh_ | 2 Comments

• understanding the VC project system part III: macros, environment variables and sharing

  "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 Read More... Posted Thursday, February 05, 2004 5:59 PM by josh_ | 2 Comments

• feedback

  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, when Read More... Posted Thursday, February 05, 2004 12:37 PM by josh_ | 4 Comments

• understanding the VC project system part II: configurations and the project property pages dialog

  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. Read More... Posted Wednesday, February 04, 2004 5:33 PM by josh_ | 1 Comments

• understanding the VC project system part I: files and tools

  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. the Read More... Posted Tuesday, February 03, 2004 5:46 PM by josh_ | 1 Comments