Using Makefile instead of Solution/Project files under Visual Studio (2005)

Question

Does anyone have experience using makefiles for Visual Studio C++ builds (under VS 2005) as opposed to using the project/solution setup. For us, the way that the project/soluti

Answer 1

While it's technically possible, it's not a very friendly solution within Visual Studio. It will be fighting you the entire time.

I recommend you take a look at NAnt. It's a very robust build system where you can do basically anything you need to.

Our NAnt script does this on every build:

1. Migrate the database to the latest version
2. Generate C# entities off of the database
3. Compile every project in our "master" solution
4. Run all unit tests
5. Run all integration tests

Additionally, our build server leverages this and adds 1 more task, which is generating Sandcastle documentation.

If you don't like XML, you might also take a look at Rake (ruby), Bake/BooBuildSystem (Boo), or Psake (PowerShell)