.NET sln
 

I'm new with VisualBuild. We have the version 6.0a and we use VB6 and C# VS2005 projects.

All VB6 components and projects are compiled with a group. I create this group dynamically depending projects from SourceSafe.

I would like to do the same for all C# projects. Is it possible to create dynamically a solution with all projects? How should do that?

Is there another solution that I could use instead?

Thanks for your answer!

David

Creating a full-fledged VS2005 solution file (one that the VS IDE will recognize) would be a lot of work. You could create a minimal one that only Visual Build Pro could parse and process, but this sounds like overkill because to create it you will probably need something like a Process Files step to iterate over the projects to include: instead of iterating to create a solution file, you could simply build each suitable project directly.

I recommend you use a Process Files step to iterate over *.csproj and exclude any specific projects that you don't want to build, then use a child Make VS.Net step to build each project as you iterate. That way you never build up a partially valid .sln file, reducing the complexity of the build while achieving the desired result.

See the Recurse.bld sample for some steps demonstrating use of the Process Files action.

We would like to use the process files algorithm you're suggesting to remove our dependency on solution files during the build process. However, because our .NET Project files have project references to other .NET Projects we are getting build errors when we implement the Process Files step as described above.

Is it possible to (successfully) build just a project that has other project references (without using a solution file). Are we missing a configuration step? Any help as to whether this is feasible would be appreciated. Thanks,

Ryan

[EDIT] To clarify we are using VS.NET 2003, not VS.NET 2005.

You must build using the solution file when using project references. One alternative would be to use file references. See http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/de...l/tdlg_ch3.asp for details.