Setting up a 1-step build for a Visual C++ Application

Question

Any suggestions? Code and artwork/assets are all in SVN, and we don't want to port it to GCC or another compiler before anyone suggests it! Simplicity and minimising 3rd-party tools is preferred, since we don't have a build-server it'll probably still be run on a developer's PC but we don't want them just doing a build manually and packaging it up.

It's basically just a C++ solution with several projects, plus we have an Inno Setup installer to build.

Right now it's a 3-step process (or 4 if you include uploading the release to FTP):

1. Get from SVN
2. Build solution from VC++
3. Run Inno to create the packaged installer

Answer 1

You can use MSVC pre, post & custom build steps to do this, they run programs through the windows command line. also see this: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/visualstudio/archive/2010/04/26/custom-build-steps-tools-and-events.aspx

Answer 2

If you can't do it with the VS build steps (see Necrolis' answer), then in the past I've used makefiles run with nmake, which is included with VS (you need to start a command prompt with the right environment settings for VS - there's a shortcut on the start menu.)

Nowadays I use FinalBuilder ( http://www.finalbuilder.com/home.aspx ) for all this sort of stuff, which is expensive and doesn't meet your 'not 3rd party' desire, but is an excellent tool. Once you get into it, you'll realise that there are probably far more steps you'd like to do than merely compiling/packaging - you probably want to be incrementing version numbers, moving files around, creating directories, etc. FB is good at that sort of stuff.