Batch Builds in Visual Studio 6 for VC++ project

Question

In VS 2008 and VS 2010, one can easily create a solution and modify the "Solution Configuration". We can choose what configuration each project gets built in when we trigger a build at the solution level.

Is such a facility available in the Visual Studio 6.0?

In my experience: when a configuration is chosen (form the list available) in VS6 for a VC++ project, the dependencies (which themselves have multiple configurations defined) get built in some random order. There is no way to control the configurations of dependencies at build time.

"Batch Build" does come close to this but is not as flexible for my purpose.

I have tried various options in the VS6. Hope I am clear.

Answer 1

Here is a link on the MSDEV command line. https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa699274(v=vs.60).aspx

There is a way to control the building of dependencies. Specify /NORECURSE and dependencies will not be built.

I use /REBUILD with /NORECURSE to keep the dependencies from getting built.

And I build each project one at a time inside the workspace in a bat file by doing a chdir to the subdirectory and calling MSDEV just for that subproject:

msdev myproject.dsp /MAKE "myproject - Win32 Debug" /REBUILD /NORECURSE > Build.log

Then I cd to the next project directory one at a time.

On a side note, I had difficulties for several years where NMAKE would not work for my specific tasks. Turns out that the PATH environment variable inside MSDEV (Visual Studio 6.0) is different from the PATH environment variable of a command shell you would run NMAKE on.

The Path used by the MSDEV shell is the %PATH% at the time Visual Studio 6 was installed. We use this and poke the registry as needed for MSDEV to get the correct path setup when switching revisions of our software; however this doesn't help update the %PATH%. The MSDEV path can be queried with a query script. I don't have my example handy.

That is why builds in MSDEV sometimes work when builds using the command line don't, as the path to DLLs differ, and any custom build steps that run .exe will not work outside of the MSDEV environment unless the path is updated.

I have a script somewhere that reads the queries the registry to extract the MSDEV path and update PATH of a shell so that batch scripts doing nmake will work as they would inside the MSDEV shell environment. The problem with the REGISTRY QUERY is that the return arguments differ with different flavors of Windows (XP/SERVER2003/...).

One thing I just discovered is that Incredibuild works with the old VS6.0 MSDEV IDE. This is a game changer. It distributes builds. I'm evaluating it now, but it might be useful to anyone waiting for long VS6.0 builds.