Replacement for CMake

Question

I use CMake's build rules in visual studio to pre-process my files before sending them to the compiler, but my clients don't like this.

Is there an alternative to CMake or a method for preprocessing my files and integrating them into a visual studio?

Answer 1

As I understand it, you use CMake to generate the files consumed by the VS project that you created manually. For some reason, your VS project clients don't like CMake. Presumably, you connected this by creating custom build steps that invoke CMake to generate files in your project, either as Build Events in your project or as custom build steps for various files in the project, for example, script inputs.

VS allows you to run any arbitrary set of commands as part of a build event or custom build step. Thus, you can replace CMake with a suitable script or custom executable file written by you. It is hard to be specific without knowing for sure that CMake does not attract your customers.

You can use JavaScript through the Windows script Host to create fairly complex scripts that handle custom build steps. They can take command line arguments, access the file system, etc. For some reason, WSH JavaScript is a big secret among most developers, and they think that all they have in Windows because of the box are DOS batch files and shell scripts. JavaScript has been part of the OS for more than 10 years, and you can debug scripts in the Visual Studio script debugger, which is very nice.