Is msbuild maintained?

[AlexGuteniev]

Is msbuild project maintained?

[StephanTLavavej]

The stl/msbuild directory is part of the old Microsoft-internal build system that's currently used to build all of the flavors of the STL shipping in Visual Studio. This includes native, /clr, and /clr:pure support libraries, desktop and OneCore versions, and normal and Spectre-mitigated binaries. (For all of our supported architectures: x86, x64, ARM, and ARM64.)

Currently, the new CMake build system builds only a subset of these flavors. One of our work items is to extend the CMake system to handle all of these flavors, then change the Microsoft-internal build system to simply invoke CMake (as we already do for the ASan support libraries), then delete stl/msbuild forever.

When adding, deleting, or renaming source files, stl/msbuild must be kept in sync, even though it isn't used (or usable) in the GitHub repo. https://github.com/microsoft/STL/wiki/Files-To-Edit-When-Adding-Or-Removing-Files records those steps.

[AlexGuteniev]

Then there's a problem with #593
I need to add new satellite without being able to automatically compile it.
Is it possible to compile msbuild project manually without Microsoft-internal build system?

[StephanTLavavej]

Is it possible to compile msbuild project manually without Microsoft-internal build system?

Not to my knowledge. Don't worry about the MSBuild stuff - we'll take care of that. (Adding a new satellite DLL involves making several changes on the Microsoft-internal side, including the VS setup machinery that actually installs files.)

I need to add new satellite without being able to automatically compile it.

The CMake build system does build the satellites (one flavor only); I see you're already editing stl/CMakeLists.txt. Is that not sufficient for your testing?

[AlexGuteniev]

The CMake build system does build the satellites (one flavor only); I see you're already editing stl/CMakeLists.txt. Is that not sufficient for your testing?

That's really enough, it builds static/dynamic, debug/release, x86/x64 -- all combinations work for me.

I was just making sure that there's no effort needed from my side to make msbuild project.

[StephanTLavavej]

Thanks for checking! 😸

If this turns out to be a common question, we could add a README to stl/msbuild similar to tests/tr1/README.md.