Marius Bancila’s Blog

I have updated my Visual Studio addin that displays the status of a build/clean/deploy action. If you get the latest version, 1.2, and are running Visual Studio 2005, 2008 or 2010 (they are all supported) on Windows 7, the progress of the build is also displayed on the Taskbar, on the item corresponding to the Visual Studio instance.

The following images show no progress, different progress steps, and an error during the build/clean/deploy, both for Visual Studio 2008 and Visual Studio 2010 (Beta 2).

This was possible by using the Windows 7 Taskbar interop library available on MSDN Code Gallery here.

You can get the latest version of the addin from the Visual Studio Gallery at this link.

Yesterday I have installed Visual Studio 2010 and decided to try my VSBuildStatusAddin. It work on the first try, only with a change to the .AddIn configuration file.

Here is some screen shots in Visual Studio 2010.

VSStatusBuild in Visual Studio 2010

Visual Studio 2010 about window with VSbuildStatus addin

The images above show a new version of the add-in, 1.1.0. This new version provides the following features:

• displays the build/clean/deploy progress on a status bar
• shows information about latest available version with link to download page
• as already explained, works in Visual Studio 2010

The new version is available at the Visual Studio Gallery.

I have fixed several bugs on version 1.0.4 of my VSBuildStatus add-in for Visual Studio that displays the status of a build/clean/deploy operation. The bugs were mainly about the batch builds. The new version is 1.0.5.

You can download this Visual Studio 2005 & 2008 add-in from here. If you are using a previous build I encourage you download and use the latest.

I have modified my VSBuildStatus add-in to work with Visual Studio 2005. Basically I had to remove the LINQ stuff to break the dependency on the version 3.5 of the .NET framework.

The new version (1.0.3) that supports Visual Studio 2005 is available here. Let me know if you have any problems with it. Especially in VS 2005.

I have created an published at Visual Studio Gallery an add-in for Visual Studio 2008, called VSBuildStatusAddin. This add-in shows the status of a build/clean/deploy operation. I hope some of you will find this useful. Bellow is a description of the add-in.

Installation
Extract the content of the archive to your Visual Studio 2008 add-ins folder. You can configure that from Tools > Options > Environment > Add-in/Macros Security. You can also extract it to any folder and then add that folder to the Add-in File Paths list.

Startup
The add-in is configured to start when the Visual Studio starts. However, the first you start Visual Studio, after you installed the add-in, you have to go to the Tools menu and use the VSBuildStatusAddin command to show the tool window. For future runs, Visual Studio remembers the position, docking style and visibility. If the add-in window was opened the last time you closed Visual Studio, the next time it starts is automatically shown at the last position.

Usage
On the add-in window toolbar there are four check buttons that are used to select what projects can be shown in the list (depending on their build status) and the number of projects in that state:

• Done: show projects there were successfully built/cleaned/deployed; displays the number of successfully done projects;
• Failed: show projects that failed to build/clean/deploy; displays the number of failed projects;
• Skipped: show projects that were skipped for the build/clean/deploy operation; displays the number of skipped projects;
• Pending: show projects that were not yet built/cleaned/deployed or are currently building/cleaning/deploying; displays the number of projects not yet done

When a build/clean/deploy operation is executing, a progress control shows the progress status, in percentage of completed project out of the total number of projects.

A fifth button, Cancel, is available during the execution of an operation and can be used to cancel the operation.

The projects list shows the name, configuration, target platform, status and completion time for a project. Projects are grouped under solution folders, if any.

The image above shows a solution called DemoSolution with a project, DemoFSharp, directly under root. It has two solution folders, CSharp and CPP, and both have two more solution folders. CSharp has Lesson1 and Lesson2, each with two projects. CPP has Begin and End, each with one project. The second image shows building a project, Chapter2 (that has a dependency on project Chapter1, which is also built), that failed.

You can also download it from here.