Dependencies for unsupported languages

[John Kerr]

I have read through the documentation discussing managing dependencies on supported compilers. I however have a mixed environment that includes both supported and unsupported compilers that build applications that have compile interdependencies between them. My build environment uses VB6 and VC++ as well as Gupta and CL in an incremental build process. The entire platform consists of upwards of several hundred components. How can VBP be used to manage such a complicated dependency list?

[kinook]

You would define your build steps to build things in the proper order. The Make VB6 and Make VC6 actions will handle dependencies within a group/workspace when building, but you would need to the define the order to properly handle interdependencies between those and other compilers.

[John Kerr]

Your suggestion would work for a continuous build process since you define a build order instead of build dependencies but again, how would VBP work for an incremental build process in this situation? For example, I have a change to 1.dll which is written in Gupta. I want to build only 1.dll and any other assemblies that reference it. The build order might be 1.dll (Gupta) 2.dll (VB6) 1.exe (Gupta) 2.exe (VB6) while ignoring the rest of the builds in the platform at that time. The solution needs to detect the dependencies regardless of the compile language. I suppose that a custom app could handle this functionality but can VBP?

[kinook]

Typically, the development tool itself (nmake, msdev, devenv, msbuild, etc.) will implement incremental building of individual projects (compiling only the source files that have changed since the last build). Since VB6 doesn't, VBP's Make VB6 step adds that capability for it: http://www.visualbuild.com/Manual/makevb6.htm. If Gupta and/or CL don't provide this, you may want to wrap those with something like nmake and call that from VBP.