Is there a tool that will generate Visual Studio 2008 projects?

Question

Does anyone know of an application that meets the following criteria?

I'd like to use a GUI tool to generate a batch of related Visual Studio 2008 projects. For example, I know that I'll need a solution file, a web project for my UI, a class library for my business objects, and a class library for my data access layer. I'd like to use a GUI application that will prompt me for the types of projects, their names, their location in the filesystem, and their default namespaces. When I'm ready, it will generate those as specified.

Icing on the cake would be the ability to specify what references to include in each project and perhaps some basic project items like empty classes, controls, or forms/pages.

I'd prefer free/open source software, but if there's a commercial tool that you feel is worth the money, I'd love to hear about it. For what it's worth, I think something like LLBLGen Pro or CodeSmith is probably overkill for what I'm looking for. If there's nothing out there that does what I want I'll look into writing my own, but I might as well not re-invent the wheel if I can find something acceptable.

Answer 1

My understanding of T4 is that it is supposed to help with that.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb126445.aspx

Answer 2

At my last job, we generated Visual Studio 2003 and 2005 project files from our Makefiles. So you could do a "make" to build, or a "make debug" to launch the IDE with the newly generated project file. Doing a build from the IDE would invoke "make" instead of using the IDE's native facilities for building, so you didn't have to synchronize all the crazy compiler flags, defines, etc. in the IDE, 'cause it didn't use them. All you needed to do was make it point to the makefile properly, and have the list of files in the project. By the time I left, they had also generated solution file for executables, such that the solution would contain the project to build the exe, plus the projects to build all the libraries it depended on.

I've since moved to a new company, where I haven't needed to generate Visual Studio projects, but I do generate project files for Cross Works IDE (for my ARM development) and the Silicon Labs IDE (for my 8051 development).

If you've got a properly set-up build system, it shouldn't take a competent *nix geek more than a day to add project file generation. Easiest way is to make a project file template with tags in it like , , and then replace them (I use sed) with the actual value. In the case of , you can't just put a file name, but instead the IDE-specific string for the list of file names and locations.

This has worked great at making a sane cross-platform build system (make, SCons, Jam, whatever) that can be user-friendly for people who are attached to their IDEs, especially windows users.

Answer 3

Are you aware of a freeware tool on Codeplex called TreeSurgeon?

It does provide a way to "click'n'create" Visual Studio projects - I am uncertain as to how flexible it is in being adapted / tweaked to your particular needs, though.

Certainly worth a look, I'd say!

Marc