Confusing behaviour from visual-studio plugin when a configured toolChain isn't present about gradle

[philmcardle]

I've found another instance of this, which I can't work around, which might eventually block me.

Environment: Gradle 3.1, Windows 10 Version 1607, now with MinGW installed.

apply plugin: 'cpp'
apply plugin: 'visual-studio'

model {

    toolChains {

        gcc(Gcc) {

        }

    }

    platforms {
        x64 {
            architecture "x64"
        }
    }

    components {

        TestProject(NativeLibrarySpec) {
            targetPlatform 'x64'
        }

    }

}

This, again, doesn't create the full set of Visual Studio tasks. This is a bit of a nuisance for us as we're looking at (but haven't got to yet) cross-compiling both locally (MinGW / VM with shared disk / Windows Linux Subsystem) and also remote (Visual C++ for Linux) and it would be appreciated if the Visual Studio plugin would just generate the IDE projects and solutions.

[lacasseio]

Thanks for reporting the limitation between Visual Studio and Gcc. The visual studio integration is limited when it comes to your current scenario. There is some idea in discussion in how this can be improved in order to provide a better solution. The IDE, especially for C++, is opinionated on certain modeling which make it the integration harder than it seems.

We decided not to take route of generating native IDE projects and solutions because of the complexity when it comes to mapping generated source set, pre-build, pre-link and post-link steps. The current solution is by far perfect and because of this it's harder to integrate current Visual Studio plugins. It's best to seek a solution in Gradle as you will be able to reuse the logic on local developer machine as well as CI server. That been said, share your various usage scenario with us so we can take them into account during future design improvement.

[philmcardle]

I suppose I should clarify, my issue is that the Visual Studio plugin won't create some of the IDE tasks when Gradle knows that it can't build that target, but it's not consistent and it's not explained - i.e. it creates the Project and Filters tasks, but not the Solution task or the encompassing lifecycle tasks.

I would like the Visual Studio plugin (or any IDE project generator) to work independently from whether the target binaries are buildable, or, if it must be tied to whether to something is buildable, then it shouldn't generate only half the tasks - it should generate none of them.

I'm not expecting Gradle's Visual Studio plugin to generate Visual Studio projects with VS-equivalent build steps (pre-build, pre-link, etc.) - we're implementing all the build logic in Gradle, however, almost all of our developers will want to work in Visual Studio, so it's paramount that I'm able to generate something.

I've already written quite a lot of gradle (and will write more yet) to modify the generated Visual Studio projects, but it's much easier when I can depend on Gradle having created the projects in the first place :)

[lacasseio]

Thanks for reporting this issue, we will consider your scenario in the improvement work for Visual Studio integration.

[big-guy]

Issue moved to gradle/gradle-native #496 via ZenHub