Comments on: Slickening up the build cycle for compiled plugins

By: Eric Cosky

Eric Cosky — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 03:41:43 +0000

I have Visual Studio’s output file for the shader DLL set to the same place XSI would copy it to after installation of the SPDL, and the debugger settings configured to run XSI.exe as the app to debug. With this setup, I can make any changes I want to the plug in without ever having to re-install it - just press F5 to build & try out my latest changes. This has been good for iterating, especially when combined with edit-and-continue.

That being said, nice tutorial and thanks for putting it up. I learned some stuff from it even if it solves the original problem differently than I do :)

By: Aiden Weatherby

Aiden Weatherby — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 05:08:17 +0000

This is the exact reason I use eclipse to compile all my c++ stuff.

I’m actually still compiling with the visual studio command line builder but it’s all controlled through a make file.

So basically the make file does the unload which runs xsibatch to unload the plugin and clear all dlls then the plugin is compiled and dlls copied to workgroup xsibatch to load in the plugin and wahlaa all finished. :)

By: Reinhard Claus

Reinhard Claus — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 15:32:22 +0000

This will be useful, thanks for posting it. Related, but only useful for minor code changes, I find VS’s edit and continue feature quite neat. It lets you, after running into a breakpoint, or pausing the execution manually (pause button), go into the code and make changes. Before the execution is resumed (play button), VS will automatically recompile the code and replace the dll in memory without the need to unload/reload.

required changes to project settings-
1. linker settings>incremental linking : active
2. c/c++ settings>dbg info format : program database for edit and continue
3. c/c++ settings>code generation>function level linking : active

This is nice for code tweaks. For larger changes I’d go with Kim’s method since I’ve had some issues with missing error output while recompiling. Also sometimes I get a “changes are too big” error :)

By: Graham Clark

Graham Clark — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 17:30:13 +0000

Great Kim, looks very useful, I’ll give it a go, I was about to try to automate this with my c# plugins, but try to do it from .net and drive XSIs unload and reload