[Mono-dev] Upcoming pull request; Generating csproj files and compiling Mono in Visual Studio

[Jean-Michel.Perraud at csiro.au]

Hi,

I finally followed up on some upgrades to the build process generating the visual studio csproj and solution files. For reference prior discussions are at http://lists.ximian.com/pipermail/mono-devel-list/2012-May/thread.html#38852.

I have a fork at https://github.com/jmp75/mono/commits/master. Before submitting my first pull request I'd like to double-check where the bar is. Mostly, I do not know who uses these .csproj files and for what; if you do, I'd like to hear advice/comment from you.

Current status is:
- Generates distinct project files for successive versions of assemblies whose build is iterative (circular dependencies)
- Projects reference other projects, in preference to referencing relative paths to a DLL.
- Most assemblies then compile in visual studio, BUT there are some issues yet to weed out (mcs-build, some unit test assemblies)
- Multiple solutions files are generated, with different scopes (the full one has ~300 projects)
- Tested on a Windows+cygwin+Mono+MS.NET setup. Not yet run on Linux.

I'll polish what I can, meaning documentation and hopefully figure out some compilation issues, but don't want to raise the bar and delay the pull request unnecessarily.

Regards,
J-M