The Visual Studio Project Templates
The project templates as you recall are the text files with some place holders that ibs populates with the values from the substitution dictionaries to generate the final .vcproj files. There are three different types of projects: static library, dynamic library, and a program. Each project type has its own template.
To create the template files I simply took the .vcproj file for each type of project I created manually and replaced anything that was project-specific (like the source files or list of dependencies) with a place holder. Let's examine one of the template files. Here is the template for a static library. The name of the file is static_lib.vcproj. The template is just an XML file and the place holders are ${Name}, ${GUID}, ${HeaderFiles} and ${SourceFiles}. Note the
Bob finished the implementation of the VC++ 2008 component of ibs and tested it on Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7. First, he generated all the Visual Studio build files using the build_system_generator.py script:
Bob verified that the necessary .vcproj and .sln files were created and proceeded to build the solution. He started with a command-line build using the vcbuild.exe program. This program is normally located for Visual Studio 2008 in : "c:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\VC\vcpackages".
To build the hello world solution you can just pass the hello_world.sln filename to vcbuild. Here is the short PowerShell snippet Bob ran in the src directory to build hello_world:
Isaac barged in as usual and wanted to witness the Windows tests first hand. Bob copied the punctuator.dll from the dlls\punctuator\Debug directory to apps\hello_world\Debug and ran the hello_world.exe application that was built by vcbuild.exe:
Isaac was duly impressed, but wanted to verify that the solution can be built from the Visual Studio IDE too. Bob launched a new instance of Visual Studio and loaded the generated hello_world.sln solution. It then built it successfully (see Figure 3).
Next, Bob ran the testWorld program from within Visual Studio and put a breakpoint to demonstrate that ibs produces code that can be debugged properly (See Figure 4).
Isaac decided that ibs proved itself to be a strong cross-platform build system. Hw wanted to see it deployed and used to build and develop the "Hello World - Enterprise Platinum Edition". Bob was very excited and assured him that ibs is ready to go.
In this article you saw ibs in action, generating a full fledged VC++ 2008 solution for a non-trivial system that involves multiple projects, static libraries, shared libraries, applications and test programs. ibs handled well multiple target Windows operating systems (Windows XP, Vista and 7) and allowed building and testing from the Visual Studio IDE or externally from the command-line (using vcbuild.exe). Bob demonstrated ibs successfully to Isaac his manager and in the next episode, Bob will deploy ibs in the field and will wrestle with real-world issues and requirements.
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<VisualStudioProject
ProjectType="Visual C++"
Version="9.00"
Name="${Name}"
ProjectGUID="${GUID}"
RootNamespace="${Name}"
Keyword="Win32Proj"
TargetFrameworkVersion="0"
>
<Platforms>
<Platform
Name="Win32"
/>
</Platforms>
<ToolFiles>
</ToolFiles>
<Configurations>
<Configuration
Name="Debug|Win32"
OutputDirectory="Debug"
IntermediateDirectory="Debug"
ConfigurationType="4"
>
<Tool
Name="VCCLCompilerTool"
Optimization="0"
AdditionalIncludeDirectories=".;../..;../../../3rd_party/include/win32/"
PreprocessorDefinitions="WIN32;_DEBUG;_LIB"
MinimalRebuild="true"
BasicRuntimeChecks="3"
RuntimeLibrary="1"
UsePrecompiledHeader="0"
WarningLevel="3"
Detect64BitPortabilityProblems="true"
DebugInformationFormat="4"
/>
</Configuration>
<Configuration
Name="Release|Win32"
OutputDirectory="Release"
IntermediateDirectory="Release"
ConfigurationType="4"
>
<Tool
Name="VCCLCompilerTool"
AdditionalIncludeDirectories=".;../..;../../../3rd_party/include/win32/"
PreprocessorDefinitions="WIN32;NDEBUG;_LIB"
RuntimeLibrary="0"
UsePrecompiledHeader="0"
WarningLevel="3"
Detect64BitPortabilityProblems="true"
DebugInformationFormat="3"
/>
</Configuration>
</Configurations>
<References>
</References>
<Files>
<Filter
Name="Header Files"
Filter="h;hpp;hxx;hm;inl;inc;xsd"
UniqueIdentifier="{93995380-89BD-4b04-88EB-625FBE52EBFB}"
>
${HeaderFiles} </Filter>
<Filter
Name="Resource Files"
Filter="rc;ico;cur;bmp;dlg;rc2;rct;bin;rgs;gif;jpg;jpeg;jpe;resx"
UniqueIdentifier="{67DA6AB6-F800-4c08-8B7A-83BB121AAD01}"
>
</Filter>
<Filter
Name="Source Files"
Filter="cpp;c;cc;cxx;def;odl;idl;hpj;bat;asm;asmx"
UniqueIdentifier="{4FC737F1-C7A5-4376-A066-2A32D752A2FF}"
>
${SourceFiles} </Filter>
</Files>
<Globals>
</Globals>
</VisualStudioProject>
Testing the Visual Studio-Generated build System
PS Z:\ibs> python .\build_system_generator.py --build_system=VC_2008
--------------------
generate_build_files
--------------------
platform: win32
----------------------
_populate_project_list
----------------------
----
test
----
----
dlls
----
----
apps
----
--
hw
--
-----------------
generate_projects
-----------------
-------------
save_projects
-------------
------------------------
generate_workspace_files
------------------------
apps
dlls
hw
test
-------------
make_solution
-------------
--------------------
get_existing_folders
--------------------
['test',
'testHello',
'testPunctuator',
'testWorld',
'dlls',
'punctuator',
'apps',
'hello_world',
'hw',
'hello',
'utils',
'world']
-------------
make_projects
-------------
-------------------
make_configurations
-------------------
--------------------
make_nested_projects
--------------------
$vcbuild = "c:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\VC\vcpackages\vcbuild.exe"
& $vcbuild hello_world.sln
PS <root dir>\src\apps\hello_world\Debug> cp..\..\..\dlls\punctuator\Debug\punctuator.dll .
PS <root dir>\src\apps\hello_world\Debug> .\hello_world.exe
hello, world!
Done.
Conclusion
