What’s Cooking in the Labs — MSBuild
We’ve got a lot Cooking in the Labs here at good old CodeGear. Last post, I pointed to what Steve Shaughnessy has in the oven. Another thing we’ve got cooking is support for MSBuild.
The Microsoft Build Engine (MSBuild) is the new "open and standardized" build platform for Microsoft Windows. We’ve been working on moving Delphi onto MSBuild as it’s core build system. This is cool because it increases build functionality, configurability, and flexibility and opens Delphi up to a completely new cottage industry of build add-ons.
With MSBuild, you can create a set of configurations to be used as build targets. For instance, you might be hyper cautious, and want to have a configuration where you want to check anything and everything. You can then save that configuration with the name of, say, "Everything".
Then, when you want to compile with the configuration of "Everything", you can choose that as the Build Configuration:
And the IDE will build with all those items checked in the options.
We also support Pre- and Post-Build Events. These events will fire before and after the actual build itself.
If I compile an application with the above settings, then I’ll get this as an output:
MSBuild also has the ability to accept addins and plugins for actions, so you can fully customize your build experience in the IDE. For instance, you could write a task that runs DUnit tests on your code before compiling a project.
MSBuild will give Delphi developers a much richer and more capable build experience, both from the command line and from the IDE.
that’s kinda cool!
February 20th, 2007 at 8:10 amd
"[..]runs DUnit tests on your code before compiling [..]"? How does this work? Have you thought about doing something similar for ANT?
February 20th, 2007 at 12:14 pmDoes this mean I can finally build in copying my project dfms to a seperate deployment directory finally? That would be nice.
Question: how does this impact Turbo Delphi? Will their be a Turbo Delphi 2007 update soon??
I’d probably be wanting to get it for the build system, maybe even the php thing for a project that’s just cropped up.
Heck, I am still fighting with the fulfilment house to send the physical media from a December 18th order. I should probably call them again here pretty quick, what with it being two months now. Nick, I should probably drag you in on this pretty quick…..
February 20th, 2007 at 1:26 pmThis is great, been needing this for a long time!
February 21st, 2007 at 6:19 pmJoe –
The Turbo Explorers, being a free product, didn’t come with Command Line Compilers.
All paying customers get command line compilers.
Nick
February 22nd, 2007 at 11:44 amYes, that’s what you had said before. But you had also said that, even for paying customers, the command-line compilers would *only* be available as a separate download. Has that changed now?
February 23rd, 2007 at 5:02 amJoe –
What you are talking about is /only/ true for the Turbo products.
All other products come with the command line compiler in the box.
Nick
February 23rd, 2007 at 8:59 am