I have a rather large solution (80 projects). Recently I upgraded to VS2015U1 and modified the solution to include a makefile (nmake) project that is a prerequisite to all other projects. The intention was that this makefile should copy some third party software into the project's bin directory to make it easier to bring things together for testing and packaging.
The problem is, this makefile project always appears to be out-of-date. This mean I always get a dialog popup when you hit F5 to test.
I've Googled till my Googler was sore, including everything I found on stackoverflow. None of the solutions listed appear to help:
- There are no files listed for this project, so none are out of date. I even put the makefile itself as a project file, but that doesn't help.
- I added a fake output file to the makefile project by including it in the properties, and causing the make file to create one when it's run.
- I've set the build output verbosity to diagnostic and have gone through the .log file extensively and not found a hint of any file that was missing or out-of-date.
- None of the other projects appear to be rebuild, just the one makefile project. When the makefile runs, everything appears to by up-to-date for the files that would be copied.
- There are no .tlog files related to the new project.
- Doing a clean build or rebuild does not help, this one project is always out of date.
Anyone have any other ideas?
It is beginning to appear (although I can find no documentation to back this up) that all makefile type projects are always out of date.
One possible answer I found is that you can create a "Utility" type project. This type of project has only a Pre-Build, Pre-Link, and Post-Build Event. You can then add the make/nmake command in there. There side effects, but in my case it was tolerable.
Try it yourself and see what you think, then report back here with what you've discovered.
Since MSBuild, which Visual Studio uses, serves the same purpose as nmake, I just replaced the nmake project with a straight MSBuild project in a .csproj file and added it as a project to my solution, making the other projects depend on it. It doesn't pop-up that project-out-of-date dialog on starting the debugger, and it properly recognizes when the files I want to create are out of date.
See the MSBuild documentation for reference on how to specify build targets, etc.
来源：https://stackoverflow.com/questions/34661715/added-makefile-project-to-visual-studio-2015-solution-is-always-out-of-date