[CMake] User configuration files for Visual Studio

[Michael Jackson]

In light of the current topic about copying 3rd Party DLLs into the build directory on Visual Studio one suggestion was to create this type of file. With that in mind I am now interested in this feature. Would make a nice addition and help those of us who do 32/64 dev all on the same machine where we can not set global paths.

Thanks
___________________________________________________________
Mike Jackson                    Principal Software Engineer
BlueQuartz Software                            Dayton, Ohio
mike.jackson at bluequartz.net              www.bluequartz.net

On Jan 11, 2012, at 9:54 AM, Robert Dailey wrote:

> I guess I have failed to strike the interest of anyone on this?
> 
> ---------
> Robert Dailey
> 
> 
> On Mon, Jan 9, 2012 at 5:58 PM, Robert Dailey <rcdailey at gmail.com> wrote:
> there are .user files generated by newer versions of Visual Studio (since 2005 I believe) that contain per-machine or per-workspace information. For all intents and purposes these are temporary files that are not checked into version control.
> 
> The normal file naming convention for these are:
> 
> project.vcproj.DOMAIN.USER.user
> 
> Where DOMAIN is the machine/domain name, and USER is the local account name.
> 
> I found out a couple of years ago that if you rename it to this:
> 
> project.vcproj.user
> 
> Visual Studio will treat this as "defaults" for the machine-specific version created using the naming convention I first outlined.
> 
> The user files are useful for setting debug working directory and command arguments. There are some other things you can set but I have never found a use for them. Since I like to set these two parameters, what I've done is keep my template user file in version control, and use CMake's configure_file() to fill in the command arguments and working directory fields for me. This approach is a good workaround but I'd really like to see CMake generate these for me. Right now I have to keep 1 user file for each version of visual studio that can be used, and configure them differently based on VS IDE selection.
> 
> Would it be suitable for CMake to incorporate this functionality? If CMake provided built-in support for this, we could create target properties that would set these fields on the target (it would set them on the generated user file instead of the vcproj file like normal target properties would do):
> 
> set_target_properties( project PROPERTIES
>    DEBUG_COMMAND_ARGUMENTS "-debug -reg"
>    DEBUG_WORKING_DIRECTORY "${CMAKE_CURRENT_SOURCE_DIR}"
> )
> 
> I'd be happy to help implement this should David, Bill, and others find it to be a good idea.
> 
> PS: I think I can do it without boost this time ;)
> 
> ---------
> Robert Dailey
> 
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