VC Build included in Visual Studio 2005 Beta 1

Several month ago, Peter Huene introduced VC Build, a command line tool to build C++ projects and solutions. For building our product, we have a huge batch file, which spawns devenv for every project. You have to know that devenv loads lots of DLLs and consumes much memory, even if you’re just building a project from the command line. The number of our projects is triple-digit, so devenv is started more than a hundred times. The entire build of our software took on my machine 1 1/4 hours.

Then I changed our build scripts to use VC Build instead of devenv. Now the build takes about 45 minutes, i.e. it’s reduced to 60%!

(First it didn’t work properly, because VC Build didn’t return an error code of the build failed. Peter posted an update after I and someone else reported some bugs)

Today I discovered that VC Build is not a nice tool hidden in the ‘net anymore. Now it’s part of Visual Studio 2005, at least part of Beta 1. You can find it in <whidbey installation path>\VC\VCpackages\.

(I planned to post about VC Build for long time, but I’ve forgotten. Funny incidence that today I found VC Build in Whidbey, and Jamie “NUnitAddin” Cansdale mentioned VC Build in his blog).