[Mono-dev] csproj files for Mono's class libraries.

[Miguel de Icaza]

Hello guys,

    I have resumed my work on creating visual studio project files for
our assemblies.   I have checked the solutions, currently these
solutions are intended to be used by developers that want to build
their code with Visual Studio.  Although currently you must invoke
msbuild/xbuild or virtual studio on a project-by-project basis, the
idea would be to do use these files to drive the entire build process
on Windows.   Since this is a weekend, I do not have a Windows machine
handy to test the process there.

    Ideally, we can turn this into building Mono entirely using
msbuild, which should be a lot faster than using the cygwin/makefile
setup.

    The solution files are generated from the actual configuration
data used in the Makefiles, so it should be easy to keep the visual
studio solutions in sync with any changes that happens to the
makefiles.   Currently the process works by extracting the arguments
list from an actual build of Mono and this produces the flags in the
file mono/msvc/scripts/order.xml.   Then the genproj tool in
mono/msvc/scripts is used to populate all of the solution files from
this input.    This means that either a cygwin or Unix system is
required to maintain the order.xml file, but with an up-to-date
order.xml file, we should be able to keep the build in sync.

    Would love to hear your feedback

Miguel