Visual Studio Projects

The build system contains alpha support for generating Visual Studio project files to aid with development.

To generate Visual Studio project files, you’ll need to have a configured tree:

mach configure

(If you have built recently, your tree is already configured.)

Then, simply generate the Visual Studio build backend:

mach build-backend -b VisualStudio

If all goes well, the path to the generated Solution (.sln) file should be printed. You should be able to open that solution with Visual Studio 2010 or newer.

Currently, output is hard-coded to the Visual Studio 2010 format. If you open the solution in a newer Visual Studio release, you will be prompted to upgrade projects. Simply click through the wizard to do that.

Structure of Solution

The Visual Studio solution consists of hundreds of projects spanning thousands of files. To help with organization, the solution is divided into the following trees/folders:

Build Targets

This folder contains common build targets. The full project is used to perform a full build. The binaries project is used to build just binaries. The visual-studio project can be built to regenerate the Visual Studio project files.

Performing the clean action on any of these targets will clean the entire build output.

Binaries

This folder contains common binaries that can be executed from within Visual Studio. If you are building the Firefox desktop application, the firefox project will launch firefox.exe. You probably want one of these set to your startup project.

Libraries

This folder contains entries for each static library that is produced as part of the build. These roughly correspond to each directory in the tree containing C/C++. e.g. code from dom/base will be contained in the dom_base project.

These projects don’t do anything when built. If you build a project here, the binaries build target project is built.

Updating Project Files

As you pull and update the source tree, your Visual Studio files may fall out of sync with the build configuration. The tree should still build fine from within Visual Studio. But source files may be missing and IntelliSense may not have the proper build configuration.

To account for this, you’ll want to periodically regenerate the Visual Studio project files. You can do this within Visual Studio by building the Build Targets :: visual-studio project or by running mach build-backend -b VisualStudio from the command line.

Currently, regeneration rewrites the original project files. If you’ve made any customizations to the solution or projects, they will likely get overwritten. We would like to improve this user experience in the future.

Moving Project Files Around

The produced Visual Studio solution and project files should be portable. If you want to move them to a non-default directory, they should continue to work from wherever they are. If they don’t, please file a bug.

Invoking mach through Visual Studio

It’s possible to build the tree via Visual Studio. There is some light magic involved here.

Alongside the Visual Studio project files is a batch script named mach.bat. This batch script sets the environment variables present in your MozillaBuild development environment at the time of Visual Studio project generation and invokes mach inside an msys shell with the arguments specified to the batch script. This script essentially allows you to invoke mach commands inside the MozillaBuild environment without having to load MozillaBuild.

While projects currently only utilize the mach build command, the batch script does not limit it’s use: any mach command can be invoked. Developers may abuse this fact to add custom projects and commands that invoke other mach commands.