Visual Studio Setup Project-- adding prebuild step

Question

Hi,

I want to make my build process for producing a setup project to be a single click. However, I also want to add {smartassembly} to the build step to obfuscate the build, but only on our build machine. How can I add a pre-build step to a visual studio 2008 vdproj?

Basically, I want to move the command line argument to obfuscate the build from the end of building the application to part of the setup program, so only the build machine needs to have a license.

Alternatively, should we just get {smartassembly} for all of our developers? It's a very large cost change (going from one build license to 5 is not a trivial amount of money), so the reasoning here has to be pretty airtight. I was going to add it to just the machine responsible for the build, rather than having all developers have it, and then force developers to try to reproduce bugs in the release build that customers actually have.

Answer 1

Why not have a different target/build/configuration for your solution/projects. It is the only one built on the build machine.

(pre/post build step only for that project/target/configuration)

If that doesn't work, I'd ask the company who wrote it their suggestions.

Answer 2

yeah, it turns out I'm a moron. The UI is different, but the pre- and post- build items are in the properties as if it were a UI property, not a project property.