Question

Ive been using MSVC2010 for some time now combined with Python Tools 1.0

I’m currently working on a python project and my solution looks like this:

Solution
– Pyproj
– EmptyTestRunner

The pyproj contains a MainTest.py file that runs all my tests,
the EmptyTestRunner is just an empty project with a “Post-Build” action that runs the MainTest.py (thus running all my tests written in PyUnit on my python code each time i “re-build”)

My problem is that running the python file, it produces normal python output – which because i’m running it as a post-build event, refers it to the MSVC output window.
MSVC2010 doesn’t recognize this output as a “compile / linker” error (for example when an exception is raised in my python code which isn’t caught) so it doesn’t add it to the error window.

Is there a tool that already does this?
Is there a flag passed to the python.exe that can do it?

I’ve googled the subject throghouly but found nothing resembling it.

I’m about to just simply write a python script that will re-format the output of my pyproj to the msvc format.

thx in advance for any help!

Answer 1

I’ve done this with Visual Studio 9 (2008), so I don’t know if the trick works for 2010, but anyway: the linking between the output window and the error manager in VS is automagical. All it expects is a line of the form:

path\to\file\name(lineno) : error : text of the error

e.g.

c:\dev\myfile.ext(17) : error : 'foo' is not a valid configuration directive

if your script somehow reads a configuration file.

Then when you double click this line, it opens the file at the specified line. The error message (‘text of the error’ here) also appears in the Error list window.

All other lines of your script’s output, if they do not have this format, are not affected, so you may very well throw a lengthy explanation after the magical line – just as the C++ compiler does for template errors.

Whether you choose to modify your script to translate Python errors to a VS-compatible format or use a wrapper script is your decision – I’d favor the first one since you can catch all errors in the __main__ function, and VS-print them (given that you can still print the full Python trace just afterwards).