An automated build system for your Delphi applications is gold, and straightforward to setup using the Delphi support for msbuild.

Sometimes however, it is convenient to build any or all Configuration/Target permutations of all your projects from inside the Delphi IDE.

This has been possible since Delphi XE introduced the [Archive.is] Build Groups – RAD Studio XE. It is a really nifty feature which you can activate by clicking on the “people” icon in the project manager: .

Uwe Raabe has witten an excellent blog post on this a few years ago: [WayBack] Do you know Build Groups? | The Art of Delphi Programming

Since you can add multiple Build Groups, you can select which one contains what Configuration/Target permutations of any number of projects.

This for instance allows you to:

build all your server projects at once

only build debug versions of all projects

The Build Groups settings are saved as part of your groupproj settings and are a pretty stable feature.

Two extra tips:

With lots of projects in a project group, Delphi often runs out of memory. So be sure to apply the DDevExtensions Work around out for running of memory when building multiple projects in Delphi < 10.2.

Some Delphi versions do not allow you to run an application after you built it using the Build Groups. Press Ctrl-F9 (compile) to reset the Delphi state: after that you can run it again.

–jeroen

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