[Mono-dev] Ideas for Mono on Windows

[Daniel Morgan]

Considering that a visual studio solution/project files are in xml, could there be some configure macros created to autogenerate these solution/project files?  Automake takes a Makefile.am file as input and spits out a Makefile file.  I wonder how other free software project deal with a hybrid build system of gnu autotools/make/gcc on free software operating systems vs. visual c++ on windows.  

To answer Eno's question for mono classlib development, I use Visual Studio for:
1. creating tests to make sure they work on .net first
2. text editor
3. manually create solution/project to step debug a problem

In rare circumstances to debug a problem, I have manually created a solution and project for each assembly I needed to create and manually add files to each project.  Such as, to debug something in SybaseClient, I needed System.Data, Mono.Data.Tds, etc.  I had to modify certain source files to set various defines, such as, NET_2_0.

However, the text editor is problematic because you cannot get the formatting to be exactly like the mono style guidelines.

I'm not brave enough to build mono using Visual Studio.  It would be truly awesome if we could get the entire unmanaged and managed parts building on Visual Studio.  Of course, the Visual Studio solution and project files would be autogenerated via configure.

--- On Wed, 11/12/08, Atsushi Eno <atsushi at ximian.com> wrote:

> From: Atsushi Eno <atsushi at ximian.com>
> Subject: Re: [Mono-dev] Ideas for Mono on Windows
> To: 
> Cc: "mono-devel" <mono-devel-list at lists.ximian.com>
> Date: Wednesday, November 12, 2008, 12:36 AM
> As one of the true maintainers of classlibs I'm
> completely against
> ideas to drop cygwin support as it completely destroys my
> hacking life
> (note that I don't mean I dislike adding VS build
> support), but anyways
> here I agree with jpobst on the part to keep using
> dll.sources.
> 
...
> 
> Classlib hackers who uses Visual Studio: how do you do
> those tasks?