[SOLVED] Is there a way to use ninja to build and have cmake out put a sln file as well for vs19?

Is there a way to use ninja to build and have cmake out put a sln file as well for vs19?

I would like to use ninja to build and cmake to output a sln file so we can use the debug features in vs19.

Solution

Just open the CMake project in Visual Studio directly.

Well, this works for simple cmake-based C/C++ projects. But it assumes you don't specify any cmake options, i.e. -DOPTION_A=VALUE_A, etc. When there's some options to specify during cmake configure, edit CMake cache via GUI (e.g. CMake-GUI, Visual Studio) is a bad idea. It's time wasting.

What this question asks, is more like this:

cmake -S . -B build -DOPTION_A=VALUE_A -DOPTION_B=VALUE_B -G "Ninja Multi-Config" -DCMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE=D:/work/WindowsToolchain/Windows.MSVC.toolchain.cmake

And it generates to build directory, at least those files:

build
  -- CMakeFiles/
  -- Debug/
  -- Release/
  -- RelWithDebInfo/
  -- build.ninja
  -- build-Debug.ninja
  -- build-Release.ninja
  -- build-RelWithDebInfo.ninja
  -- cmake_install.cmake
  -- CMakeCache.txt
  -- test.sln
  -- test.vcxproj

To do so, one might use this simple CMakeLists.txt:

cmake_minimum_required(VERSION 3.25)
project(test)
add_executable(test test.cpp)

if(GEN_SLN)
  configure_file(test.sln.in ${CMAKE_BINARY_DIR}/test.sln @ONLY)
  configure_file(test.vcxproj ${CMAKE_BINARY_DIR}/test.vcxproj @ONLY)
endif()

And also have ninja.exe, vswhere.exe installed. Then the aforementioned cmake configure step generates what we expected, among which the CMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE is part of https://github.com/MarkSchofield/WindowsToolchain .

And in the template file test.vcxprojc.in, invoke cmake for configure, build and clean task:

<Target Name="Configure">
  <Message Text="Configure: mode=$(Configuration), arch=$(Platform)" />
  <Exec Command="cmake -S . -B build" ConsoleToMsbuild="true" WorkingDirectory=".." />
</Target>

<Target Name="Build">
  <Message Text="Build" />
  <CallTarget Targets="Configure" />
  <Exec Command="cmake --build build --config $(Configuration)" ConsoleToMsBuild="true" WorkingDirectory=".." />
</Target>

<Target Name="Clean>
  <Message Text="Clean" />
  <Exec Command="cmake --build build --target clean --config $(Configuration)" ConsoleToMsBuild="true" WorkingDirectory=".." />
</Target>

NOTE: this is just a very naive demo, but far better that directly using Visual Studio to open a directory that contains a CMakeLists.txt.