Setting Up the Environment

To start with, everyone needs to use a common environment owned by the Central Build Team (at least for the command-line builds). Outline to all developers and testers on the build Web page the proper directory structure that they need to create on their machines:

Here's an example:

md (make directory) \<PROJECT>\private\developer md \<PROJECT>\private\developer\<persons login name> copy \<PROJECT>\private\developer\<public share with environment files> 

I like to use three batch files to set up an environment:

• \<PROJECT>\private\developer\vincem\devenv.cmd Sets env for the whole project.

• \<PROJECT>\public\tools\developer.cmd Sets env for the developers.

• \<PROJECT>\private\developer\vincem\setenv.cmd Sets env for a specific subproject.

If you use Visual Studio (VS) to develop your project, you need to call another batch file that is provided with VS (vsvars32.bat). This file sets the proper environment variables needed to run Visual Studio from a command prompt. There are probably other similar batch files with other development tools that need to be called. Using the previous directory configuration, you should copy the correct version of vsvars32.bat to

\<PROJECT>\private\developer\vincem\vsvars32.bat 

Update the following directories via script after each build:

• \<PROJECT>\public\tools This directory contains all build/ command-line tools. Also, most importantly, this is the directory that contains the RULES.MK file, which has all the macros for the project makefiles.

• \<PROJECT>\public\bin This directory is for the developer's environment and other public command files.

Everyone needs to set up a command file shortcut on his desktop. For example:

cmd /k \<PROJECT>\private\developer\vincem\devenv.cmd

Label the shortcut DEV ENV.