I just wanted to add to Vlad’s post and show the current progress of generating the Visual Studio Project made this weekend by Vlad and I.

By using the approach mentioned in Vlad’s post we can target Visual Studio directly instead of a build system like Ninja. This gives Visual Studio the correct build flags for each file allowing features like IntelliSense and building from Visual Studio using MSBuild to work perfectly. I’m generating a project per shared library and a Visual Studio solution to group the results together. The results are quite neat because it shows at a glance which sources files are included in each library. Any files listed in the visual studio project are safe to edit which should cover the common developer workflow of editing cpp/headers and recompiling. Other rarer changes for platform developers like adding a new file and tweaking build settings should be done by closing visual studio, doing a local change and rebuilding with the mozilla build system and re-openning the updated Visual Studio Solution.

This isn’t ready for general use yet because we still don’t generate the Link step properly and handle some corner cases in XUL yet but simpler libraries like gkmedias.dll is already working well. Supporting XUL should only require a few days of work. Once this is fixed we can move to supporting advanced Visual Studio features like “Edit and Continue” and distributed compiling.