I am trying to move a set of fairly complex C++ applications/libraries from building with makefiles and command-line tools to using Visual Studio’s MsBuild. The apps/libs reference several hundred database tables, each of which has an object-relational-mapping class that handles reads, updates, etc. Each table is defined in a table definition file; we have a code generator that builds a .h and a .cpp file for each.
In a makefile, we can define an implicit rule, “.cpp.tbl :”. I’m looking to do something similar in MsBuild.
I’ve never used custom build events, before, and I’m just starting to look at the documentation. But I’m see no references at all to specifying general rules, only for building specific files. This is of no use to me whatsoever. If I’m building a library that has 450 table definitions, I most definitely do not want to specify how to build a .cpp file from a .tbl file 450 times.
Can anyone point me to some decent documentation on this?
OK, never mind. Look for “Custom Build Rules”, not “Custom Build Events”.