{"id":5373,"date":"2007-11-01T13:37:00","date_gmt":"2007-11-01T13:37:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.msdn.microsoft.com\/vcblog\/2007\/11\/01\/visual-studio-build-process-vc-libraries-and-check-in-process\/"},"modified":"2019-02-18T18:54:18","modified_gmt":"2019-02-18T18:54:18","slug":"visual-studio-build-process-vc-libraries-and-check-in-process","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/cppblog\/visual-studio-build-process-vc-libraries-and-check-in-process\/","title":{"rendered":"Visual Studio Build Process, VC++ Libraries and Check-in Process"},"content":{"rendered":"

Hi again. My name is Ale Contenti and I’m the dev lead of the VC++ Libraries team. You might have see me previously in my <\/font>channel9<\/font><\/a> interviews. I’m now in Italy for a short vacation and I’ll be in Barcelona for TechEd starting from Nov 5. I’m really excited to go there and mingle with a lot of VC++ and Visual Studio users! After TechEd, Steve Teixeira (Group Program Manager for Visual C++) and I will be in Munich, Germany to meet with customers.<\/font><\/p>\n

Today I want to talk about how we check-in changes to the VC++ Libraries, and how the libraries are used by the rest of VC++ and Visual Studio.<\/font><\/p>\n

You maybe know that the entire Visual Studio is built in our lab every night starting at 9pm (Fri & Sat night excluded, usually). The VC++ Libraries are among the first things that are built. Why? Because these libraries are immediately used by the rest of the Visual Studio components!<\/font><\/p>\n

One of the first libraries built is the C-RunTime (or CRT). The CRT consists of three main parts:<\/font><\/p>\n

·<\/font>         <\/span><\/span><\/span>The header files (like stdio.h)<\/font><\/p>\n

·<\/font>         <\/span><\/span><\/span>The import libraries (like msvcrt.lib)<\/font><\/p>\n

·<\/font>         <\/span><\/span><\/span>The DLLs (like msvcr90.dll)<\/font><\/p>\n

We build these three parts and publish them to a binaries output folder, more or less like it happens for a normal VC++ project.<\/font><\/p>\n

Additionally, the header files and the import libraries are “published” to another folder. The rest of Visual Studio components (e.g. the VC++ compiler cl.exe or the C# compiler csc.exe) are built using these newly published include files and import libraries.<\/font><\/p>\n

This has a few interesting implications:<\/font><\/p>\n

·<\/font>         <\/span><\/span><\/span>The entire Visual Studio is always built with the latest VC++ Libraries (CRT, STL, ATL and MFC)<\/font><\/p>\n

·<\/font>         <\/span><\/span><\/span>The entire Visual Studio will load the latest VC++ DLLs at runtime<\/font><\/p>\n

·<\/font>         <\/span><\/span><\/span>If there is a regression in the VC++ Libraries (for example an issue in a widely used functionality), the effects will be seen in the rest of Visual Studio as well<\/font><\/p>\n

·<\/font>         <\/span><\/span><\/span>Each change to the VC++ Libraries headers and libs need to be carefully tested to make sure the build is not broken and the Visual Studio components work correctly<\/font><\/p>\n

To make sure each VC++ Library check-in will not break the rest of Visual Studio we rely on:<\/font><\/p>\n

·<\/font>         <\/span><\/span><\/span>An extensive set of regression tests<\/font><\/p>\n

·<\/font>         <\/span><\/span><\/span>An automatic check-in system which ensures there are no build breaks and no test failures<\/font><\/p>\n

The regression tests are usually updated with the unit tests which accompany the code changes.<\/font><\/p>\n

The automatic check-in system uses more than 20 machines to build different parts of Visual Studio and then run a lot of tests targeting the newly built binaries. When everything looks ok (build and tests) the automatic system (we call it “the gauntlet” <\/font>J<\/span><\/span>) will take care of checking-in the changes and send mail with the check-in details.<\/font><\/font><\/p>\n

I hope this was interesting and ins\nightful. Let me know if you have any question\/comment.<\/font><\/p>\n

Ale Contenti<\/font><\/p>\n

VC++ Libraries Dev Lead<\/font><\/p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Hi again. My name is Ale Contenti and I’m the dev lead of the VC++ Libraries team. You might have see me previously in my channel9 interviews. I’m now in Italy for a short vacation and I’ll be in Barcelona for TechEd starting from Nov 5. I’m really excited to go there and mingle with a lot of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":289,"featured_media":35994,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5373","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-cplusplus"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"

Hi again. My name is Ale Contenti and I’m the dev lead of the VC++ Libraries team. You might have see me previously in my channel9 interviews. I’m now in Italy for a short vacation and I’ll be in Barcelona for TechEd starting from Nov 5. I’m really excited to go there and mingle with a lot of […]<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/cppblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5373","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/cppblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/cppblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/cppblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/289"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/cppblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5373"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/cppblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5373\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/cppblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35994"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/cppblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5373"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/cppblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5373"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/cppblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5373"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}