Gaston Milano's WebLog : VB.NET...

A Better Way To Show your Build Output: BuildConsole.NET

GMilano — Mon, 16 Apr 2007 17:25:00 GMT

Sometime ago I built a tool I called Build Console. I was a quick and dirty development but until today we are using it often in our daily building.

Why I needed this tool, well I don’t wanna tell you that VS build report is really poor but… it is ;) I don’t wanna open a big solution and wait 5 minutes in order to build my solution.

I known I can use msbuild command line but it is so hard to know what is going on with the build process (how many warining, errors, what project fail, etc).

So that I built a very simple tool that just is listening msbuild and show you the in a better way what is going on with your build.

Additionally it save the history of your builds.

BuildConsole features:

Open BuildFiles and Solution Files
Show and Save Build Reports
Support for cancellation
Verbosity Configuration

Build Console solve another small problem that I always have, when building C++ I want a detailed verbosity but for C# projects I need a normal verbosity. BuildConsole assume you want this and if you choose normal when it is building a C++ project it assume detailed. I could be annoying for somebody but I need to know what C++ source is msbuild building and with normal verbosity I can’t see this.

Configuration

If you are going to use BuildConsole always with the same build file you can use the .config file

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>

<add key="BuildFile" value="mybuild.msbuild"/>

</appSettings>

</configuration>

If you need the code just drop me a line. Remember it is dirty code ;)

Download BuildConsole.NET

I would like to have a better output in Orcas ;)

CoolCommands 3.0 for Visual Studio 2005

GMilano — Wed, 10 May 2006 22:44:00 GMT

It is time for a new version of coolcommands because I found 3 new coolcommands:

Thomas Freudenberg suggested the need of a menu item to each project item which spawns the command “explorer /e, /select,<filepath>” This opens the explorer and select the specified file.

For more about Command-Line Switches for Windows Explorer http://support.microsoft.com/kb/130510

Andres Aguiar suggested having a “Copy Reference” over a project so that you don’t need to open the Add References Dialog if you want to add a Project to Project reference; you just need to select “Copy Reference” over the project and after Paste Reference over the target.

The last one for this release is “Add Projects From Folder” over a Solution

Several times I need to add a couple of projects to a Solution and it is a bit heavy add them one by one. So this command scan the selected folder for projects and shows a dialog with the projects found, in this dialog you select what projects you want to add to the solution.

A last good new, I created a setup for coolcommands ;)

Download CoolCommands

Resource Editor 1.1

GMilano — Wed, 21 Apr 2004 12:47:00 GMT

I fixed some bugs and I added 2 new features:

Generate Images (Tools/Generate Images)

This command will dump all bitmaps and icons as separated files in a selected folder.

Generate Resource Class (Tools/Generate Resource Class)

If you have a General.resx file then this command will generate a strongly resource class (I mean with a public property for each icon, bitmap or string in the resource). So that for example you can access to your string with GeneralResources.MyString

If the General.resx is in a C# project then the generated file is added to the project.

In the new code you can find how to use DTE and handle commands in VSIPExtras.

Thanks for your feedback

Download: ResourceEditor.msi