Packages vNext: Power-up our .NET Builds

In the sequel of my previous post "Managing multiple platforms in Visual Studio", having done lots of cross-platform development in .NET in the recent years both at work or for SharpDX (with platform specific assemblies, PCL, assemblies using native compiled code... etc) while trying to trick and abuse nuget and msbuild as much as possible, I have realized that in order to provide a smooth integration of "build packages", this require to be more tightly integrated at the core of a build system.

Unfortunately, we only have today a patchwork of this integration, still quite incomplete and far from what it could be, and this is hurting a lot our development process. We really need something brand new here: we have lots of inputs, usecases, and while it is of course not possible to cover every aspects of all build workflows, It is certainly possible to address most of the common issues we are facing today. Let's try to figure out where this could lead!

Managing multiple platforms in Visual Studio

Who has not struggled to correctly manage multiple platform configurations in Visual Studio without ending to edit a solution file or tweak some msbuild files by hand? Recently, I decided to cleanup the antique SharpDX.sln in SharpDX that was starting to be a bit fat and not easy to manage. The build is not extremely bizarre there, but as it needs to cover the combinations of NetPlatform x OSPlatform x DirectXVersion x Debug/Release with around 40 projects (without the samples), it is an interesting case of study. It turns out that modifying the solution to make a clean multi-platform build was impossible without hacking msbuild in order to circumvent unfortunate designs found in Microsoft msbuild files (and later to found at work in Xamarin build files as well). In this post, we will go through the gotchas found, and we will see also why Visual Studio should really improve the configuration manager if they want to improve our developers experience.

NShader 1.1, hlsl, glsl, cg syntax coloring for Visual Studio 2008 & 2010

I have recently released NShader 1.1 which adds support for Visual Studio 2010 as well as bugfixes for hlsl/glsl syntax highlighting.

While this plugin is quite cool to add a basic syntax highlighting for shader languages, It lacks intellisense/completion/error markers to improve the editor experience. I didn't have time to add such a functionality in this release as... I don't really have too much time dedicated to this project... and well, I have so much to learn from effectively practicing a lot more shader languages that I'm fine with this basic syntax highlighting! ;) Is it a huge task to add intellisense? It depends, but concretely, I need to implement for each shading language a full grammar/lexer parser in order to provide a reliable intellisense. Of course, a very basic intellisense would be feasible without this, but I would rather not to use an annoying/unreliable intellisense popup.

Building .fx hlsl files with a Custom Build Rule under Visual Studio 2008

It's sometimes convenient to be able to compile directly a .fx file under a VS C++ project. NShader provides a nice way to highlight your code, but it's not able (yet, not sure I will update it up to this feature) to compile anything or to display syntax errors.

Hopefully, there is a simple workaround, avoiding to develop your own custom building task : using a custom build rule. Unfortunately, I was able to find one a while ago on Internet, but I lost it, and if I remember, it was lacking some features (like showing all available profiles)... So I decided yesterday to implement my own building rules files, leveraging on the existing .asm rules files that is shipped with Visual Studio, and It was surprisingly easy to write it.

To add this custom building rules to VS, follow these instructions:

AsmHighlighter Part II : Automatic x86 asm instruction size evaluation

Following the previous post about AsmHighlighter, I have just released a new version 1.1 of AsmHighlighter that evaluates x86 ASM instruction size for each instructions in your code. The instruction size is inserted in the comment next to the instruction.

When you are coding 4k or 64k (partially) demos in x86 assembler with size optimization in mind, it's sometimes useful to check the instruction size (as it is sometimes not so obvious, x86 has a lot of weird rules for their instruction size, particularly when using eax register on source/destination, or using ebx without an offset...etc).

This feature is available when you perform a formating of your document (Menu Edit/Advanced/Format document or selection, or Ctrl+k, Ctrl+d). Here is a screenshot result:

The magic behind it is that i have discovered a cool managed library called : Fasm Managed from Shynd's. This is a managed .NET dll that can perform dynamic x86 ASM compilation inside a .NET application. The code is simple as below:

byte[] buffer = ManagedFasm.Assemble("mov eax, 0");

Thanks to this great module, it was quite easy to integrate a fast evaluation of a x86 instruction size, although this evaluation is done at the line level, so the evaluation doesn't have any information on labels, defines...etc. But i have integrated a simple (but not perfect) workaround. Also, because this library is using FASM as a compiler, i had to perform some "normalization" on the code (that is mainly targeting MASM syntax), but it's working quite well!


With this instruction size feature, AsmHighlighter is becoming a bit more related to 4k-64k intros coding! ;)

Adding asm x86 Syntax Highlighting to Visual Studio 2008

While i use to develop some part of 4k's intro code in x86 assembler, it is quite annoying to switch from Visual Studio to an external editor in order to have a correct syntax highlighting. I like the principle of an Integrated Development Environment, and VS is a great tool for that. Based on my previous experience on NShader, i have decided to implement a syntax highlighter for x86 ASM... and thanks to NShader's work, it was really easy to code it! For anyone looking for a place to start when developing a LanguageService Package for Visual Studio, this project is easy to follow and gives a basic implementation for syntax highlighting.

So, i have just released AsmHighlighter under codeplex. This is an AddIn for Visual Studio 2008 (it won't work for Express Editions, as they don't allow communities addIns) that enables syntax highlighting for x86 ASM language. MASM syntax is mainly supported and NASM syntax is partially supported. I have no more reason to switch to an external editor! Cool!

Apart from that, the nice thing with MASM is that it is possible to debug directly under Visual Studio, making a mixed C-ASM project much easier to develop (VS is adding building rules for ASM files automatically to your project). On the other hand, i was not able to debug with NASM as nasm cannot generate debug information under the win32 platform...

I also found a cool project called JWasm developed by Japheth : JWasm is a MASM v6 compatible assembler (with v8 bug fixes and improvements)  that is able to output win32,win64 as well as linux elf object files. Quite interesting when you still want to develop with a MASM syntax and be able to export your work under linux without moving to another assembler! Japtheth even provides JWasm.rules files for an integration under Visual Studio. It's even possible to debug JWasm output objects files under VS, that's great!

Now, you may have noticed that all of this is not strictly related to 4k-64k intros coding, but well, you can consider AsmHighlighter as a productivity tool for 4k-64k development! ;)