I’ve been spending the better part of the day wrangling with MS Visual Studio 9 as I try to become the maintainer for the client application written in C++ used by my company. Let me tell you, if that doesn’t sound like much fun, it’s even less.
Generally things are working relatively well, but occasionally VS gets a bug up its ass where every compile generates hoards of warnings for no apparent reason making me search the net and my code looking for what might be causing this.
So far as new maintainer, I’ve synchronized all the different places the previous maintainers had set varying version numbers for the app by making one central include file that is managed by a clever little Perl script I wrote to update a build number each time the project is built in release mode. I’ve created a ‘Setup’ sub-project within the solution to generate .msi install files and an optional setup.exe as well.
I come from a UNIX build environment. I used make and gcc and vi. Some of the conventions in MSVS are very foreign and they’re giving me headaches at times – especially precompiled headers. Do I use them? Do I want them? Why can’t my project find “stdafx.h”??