How to define rules in Visual Studio10 custom build step

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VS2010

Hi all,

I have the following question:

I have a VS10 project which has several files. Actually, not all files already exist. (i have included references to them)

The files which do not already exist, will be created by a tool, say foo.exe, in a custom-build step, which will be executed before compilation. This tool takes one file (all of a certain extension, say .def, which is only there, to create the new file, it will never be compiled) and creates a new file. So far so good.

Problem: I have multiple projects, for which i have to accomplish this task and i don't want to write for each file i have to create, that foo.exe takes a certain foo2.def to create a certain file.

Is there a way to say Visual Studio, that every file with a certain extension (here: .def) has to be taken by the tool to create another file?

Perhaps by a .props-file or something like this? Which i can include in all project-files (.vcxproj).

thx alot for any help!

Posted 6-Jan-15 9:27am

Member 10781325

Updated 6-Jan-15 9:30am

v2

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2 solutions

Solution 1

Use build-events[^]. Remember that the events are essentially any command line call, so you can easily call a script that does whatever you need. Your script can be anything that can be called from the command line (you can use python/perl or something else that's already natively supported in Windows).

Posted 6-Jan-15 9:49am

Albert Holguin

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Sergey Alexandrovich Kryukov 6-Jan-15 17:21pm

5ed (nice short manual is referenced, it looks like), but there is a much more robust approach. Please see Solution 2. I tried to explain its benefits.
—SA

Albert Holguin 7-Jan-15 14:58pm

Just used the reference because it was the first thing I found with the picture of the build-events section in Visual Studio. I didn't exactly remember what it was called so I had to do a quick search. I mostly work in Linux nowadays.

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Sergey Alexandrovich Kryukov · Accepted Answer · 2015-01-06T11:19:00

The better way to customize build and create your own steps would be using the MSBuild project file standard directly. Please see:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/wea2sca5%28v=vs.90%29.aspx[^],
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/7z253716.aspx[^].

You can create your own code for a custom step, which cannot be something better than the application or a batch script to be launched as a separate process. The better approach is to develop the custom Task assembly using MSBuild API. This assembly gets all required information from the build process and the project (options, file names, parameters) and can manipulate them and is expected to produce output integrated into the build process. This is a very well-designed, well-integrated and robust approach, with all elements highly standardized. At the same time, you can easily integrate 3rd-party build code, and even 3rd-party build applications without source code (which I would not prefer). It correctly works with time stamps, incremental build and rebuild, cleaning, all that. Please start here:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms171466%28v=vs.90%29.aspx[^],
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/7z253716.aspx[^].

Note that you can easily organize the build to have your custom Task assemblies compiled before other steps and then used in the build, so you don't need to have any executable, only pure source code. This is much better for good maintenance.

In a pinch, for solving simpler problems you can use the approach explained in Solution 1. But the custom steps based on such approach look and behave like "foreign" elements and are not as good for maintainability.

—SA