How to create, compile and run a project in Visual Studio for Mac.
- Build a C# Hello World application with.NET Core in Visual Studio 2017.; 3 minutes to read Contributors. In this article. This topic provides a step-by-step introduction to building, debugging, and publishing a simple.NET Core console application using C# in Visual Studio 2017.
- You can use Visual C++ in the Visual Studio integrated development environment (IDE) to create Standard C++ programs. By following the steps in this walkthrough, you can create a project, add a new file to the project, modify the file to add C++ code, and then compile and run the program by using Visual Studio.
Over the last few months, we have heard a lot of requests with respect to adding capability to Visual Studio Code to allow developers to build their C/C++ application. The task extensibility in Visual Studio Code exists to automate tasks like building, packaging, testing and deploying. This post is going to demonstrate how using task extensibility in Visual Studio Code you can call compilers, build systems and other external tasks through the help of the following sections:
Installing C/C++ build tools
In order to build your C++ code you need to make sure you have C/C++ build tools (compilers, linkers and build systems) installed on your box. If you can already build outside Visual Studio Code you already have these tools setup, so you can move on to the next section.
To obtain your set of C/C++ compilers on Windows you can grab the Visual C++ build tools SKU. By default these tools are installed at ‘C:Program Files (x86)Microsoft Visual C++ Build Tools’. You only need to do this if you don’t have Visual studio installed. If you already have Visual Studio installed, you have everything you need already.
If you are on a Linux platform which supports apt-get you can run the following commands to make sure you grab the right set of tools for building your C/C++ code.
2 4 | xcodebuild-find gcc xcodebuild-find clang |
Creating a simple Visual Studio Code task for building C/C++ code
To follow this specific section you can go ahead and download this helloworld C++ source folder. If you run into any issues you can always cheat and download the same C++ source folder with a task pre-configured.
If you are just picking up C++ and want to understand different components involved in performing a simple build you can review this guide.
In Visual Studio Code tasks are defined for a workspace and Visual Studio Code comes pre-installed with a list of common task runners. In the command palette (Ctrl+Shift+P (Win, Linux), ⇧⌘P (Mac)) you can type tasks and look at all the various task related commands.
On executing the ‘Configure Task Runner’ option from the command palette you will see a list of pre-installed tasks as shown below, in the future we will grow the list of task runners for popular build systems but for now go ahead and pick up the others template from this list.
This will create a tasks.json file in your .vscode folder with the following content:
2 4 | call'C:Program Files (x86)Microsoft Visual Studio 14.0VCvcvarsall.bat'x64 set linkerflags=/OUT:hello.exe cl.exe%compilerflags%helloworld.cpp/link%linkerflags% |
Please note that the location of vcvarsall.bat file which sets up the right environment for building could be different on your machine. Also if you are using the Visual C++ build SKU, you will need to call the following command instead:
call“C:Program Files(x86)Microsoft VisualC++Build Toolsvcbuildtools.bat”x64 |
Once the build script is ready you can then modify your tasks.json to directly call your batch file on Windows by making the following changes to the automatically generated tasks.json file.
2 4 6 8 10 12 14 16 18 20 22 24 | 'command':'clang++', '-Wall', '-v' 'isShellCommand':true, 'problemMatcher':{ 'fileLocation':[ '${workspaceRoot}' 'pattern':{ 'regexp':'^(.*):(d+):(d+):s+(warning|error):s+(.*)$', 'line':2, 'severity':4, } |
Another thing to highlight in this snippet is the ‘problemMatcher’ section. Visual Studio Code ships with some of the most common problem matchers out of the box but many compilers and other tools define their own style of errors and warnings. Need not worry you can create your own custom problem matcher as well with Visual Studio Code. This site which helps test out regex online might also come in handy.
The pattern matcher here will work well for Clang and GCC toolsets so just go ahead and use them. The figure below shows them in effect when you initiate the show problems command in Visual Studio Code (Cntrl+Shift+M (Win, Linux), ⇧⌘M (Mac)).
Calling Makefiles using Visual Studio Code task extensibility
Similar to the manner how you configure tasks.json to call the compiler, you can do the same for makefiles. Take a look at the sample tasks.json below, the one new concept in this tasks.json file is the nesting of tasks. Both ‘hello’ and ‘clean’ are tasks in the makefile where as ‘compile w/o makefile’ is a separate task but this example should show you how you can setup tasks.json in cases where there are
multiple build systems at play. You can find the entire sample here.
Note this is an OSX, Linux specific example but to obtain the same behavior on Windows you can replace ‘bash’ with ‘cmd’ and ‘args’ with ‘/C’.
2 4 6 | { 'command':'workbench.action.tasks.build' ] |
Calling MSBuild using Visual Studio Code task extensibility
MSBuild is already a pre-installed task that Visual Studio Code comes with. Bring up the command palette and choose MSBuild, this will create the following task.json it should be easy then to add your MSBuild solution, project name to the ‘args’ section and get going.