Visual Studio project files and solutions are easy and work great, until they don't. Everyone I know that develops on Windows eventually has to go and tweak those xml files when something automagical did the auto part but not the magic part.
XML make files / dependency trees are a good way to do it. IDK if Microsoft thought of that. I haven't spent a lot of time on build systems, other than simple make and VS, though I have used the systems that people have already setup for a project. Usually I just hope it works, and I don't have to mess with it too much.
But yeah when you end up dumping xcopy commands in your XML files, which is what I had to do, something isn't working ideally.
XML make files / dependency trees are a good way to do it. IDK if Microsoft thought of that.
You are basically describing MSBuild, of which Visual Studio project files are (used to be? the last project I worked on which made heavy use of it used VS 2012) a subset. It's not a bad system all things considered, at least once you install/start using the MSBuild Extension Pack
You used to be able to embed MSBuild commands into VS project files, but you had to be careful because you could very easily confuse VS by doing so.
You used to be able to embed MSBuild commands into VS project files, but you had to be careful because you could very easily confuse VS by doing so.
This would be the kind of thing that I'd see in game mods which comprise most of my Windows-specific programming. (I mean they are written in C#, but they still tend not to work on Mac or whatever. Maybe work on Linux with effort.) It could just be because these are amateur programmers almost by definition. I mean they probably have jobs, but this is an amateur effort where "works for me" is good enough.
Yeah, and nothing ever goes wrong with makefiles, CMake, or Gradle setups.
I'm talking about features like built-in profiling, extremely flexible memory inspection, edit-and-continue, and .natvis customization just to name a few.
Visual Studio project files and solutions are easy and work great, until they don't. Everyone I know that develops on Windows eventually has to go and tweak those xml files when something automagical did the auto part but not the magic part.
XML make files / dependency trees are a good way to do it. IDK if Microsoft thought of that. I haven't spent a lot of time on build systems, other than simple make and VS, though I have used the systems that people have already setup for a project. Usually I just hope it works, and I don't have to mess with it too much.
But yeah when you end up dumping xcopy commands in your XML files, which is what I had to do, something isn't working ideally.
You are basically describing MSBuild, of which Visual Studio project files are (used to be? the last project I worked on which made heavy use of it used VS 2012) a subset. It's not a bad system all things considered, at least once you install/start using the MSBuild Extension Pack
You used to be able to embed MSBuild commands into VS project files, but you had to be careful because you could very easily confuse VS by doing so.
This would be the kind of thing that I'd see in game mods which comprise most of my Windows-specific programming. (I mean they are written in C#, but they still tend not to work on Mac or whatever. Maybe work on Linux with effort.) It could just be because these are amateur programmers almost by definition. I mean they probably have jobs, but this is an amateur effort where "works for me" is good enough.
Yeah, and nothing ever goes wrong with makefiles, CMake, or Gradle setups.
I'm talking about features like built-in profiling, extremely flexible memory inspection, edit-and-continue, and .natvis customization just to name a few.