在 Team Build 中，自动构建使用 VB6 库的 C# 应用程序的最佳实践方法是什么？

Question

In Team Build, what's the best-practice way of automatically building a C# app that uses a VB6 library? both app and VbLib are constantly evolving.

Currently I've got an msbuild proj that calls VB6 from the command line, builds the lib, the lib's guid changes etc. then we manually generate an interop (via tlib), commit and ref the interop in the c# solution.

I'd like to automate the tlib bit in my msbuild file, at the moment we think someone turned off binary compatability in the VB6 lib's vbp and at the moment the interop doesn't appear to work when we deploy. Should we even be generating the interop? or should we be checking the vb lib binary into source control (which would have to be done automatically after building on the build server...)

Any thoughts or pointers appreciated

cross post to msdn

Answer 1

There isn't really a best practice. In order to include these things you'll need to call a bunch of command line utils, these can be integrated into MsBuild using custom build targets. These targets can amend the constantly changing things. I'd try to resolve this completely outside of Team Build and completely inside MsBuild, as it's much easier to influence the build process from there include the .proj file in your solution. Then just reference the solution from Team Build.

There are existing VB6 tasks that can call the compilation of your VB6 app here: http://msbuildextensionpack.codeplex.com/

It's not going to be easy though. It's probably a lot easier to make sure the VB6 project doesn't change as much, or have the VB6 project guys provide a managed wrapper as part of their release if that's possible.