SlickEdit 2008 (trial version): "Message List" feature problems...

[Musenka]

Hello.
I have downloaded SlickEdit 2008 trial and discovered some problem with new "Message List".
When I build my project in SlickEdit using Visual Studio 2005 C++ compiler, warnings and errors are correctly displayed in the "Build" window. No any problems in output. Error parsing using message patterns works OK ("Build -> Configure Error Parsing" as in old good SlickEdit 2007). But new "Message List" does not catch ANY messages from "Build". I was not able to transfer any of my build messages to "Message List" although MS VC++ compiler/builder generated many messages of different types...
I did not find anything helpful in SE 2008 documentation.
How can I debug the issue? How can I trace message capturing (MS VC++ compiler/builder --> "Build" --> "Message List" )?

[LBCEi]

I'm seeing the same problem in a VS2003 project.

[Musenka]

So is this really nice feature really working? (in general  ...)
Has anyone used "Message List" with MS Visual C++ (2003/2005) without problems?
Maybe, we have some Microsoft Specific Problem here 

[Nathan]

Hey guys,

Matthew and I have been looking at this today. It turns out that right now post-build functions are only used when our own build system, vsbuild, is being used. In this case vsbuild is not being used, MS's devenv is.

I'll talk to a few of the other developers to see if we can come up something that can work to do post-build actions 'most of the time', instead of 'never'.

In the meanwhile, you can manually get the error markers to come up by calling 'set_error_markers' from the command line.

Nathan

[hs2]

Oh no ... this is a long standing request that the build system is enhanced in exactly this way w/o the 'dirty' tricks using injected macro calls to trigger the error parser incl. markers sync'd to the end of a custom build tool execution.
BTW: I still didn't get an answer to my question if there IS another (more safe) method than echoing <binary 1> to inject macro calls from an external script.
HS2

[Musenka]

OK.
'set_error_markers' command works as expected: updates the message list. But manual invoking is not very comfortable...
Is there any simple way to catch 'switching to Message List windows' event like '_switchbuf_...'? ('_switchbuf_...' works fine and I use it to automatically highlight current file in the projects tree http://community.slickedit.com/index.php?topic=3038.msg12793#msg12793). Something like writing '_switch??_...' procedure and checking if we are in Message List now (in this procedure's body). When we are in Message List, we can invoke all commands we need. The solution is not elegant and 100% clean, of course.
Maybe there is some other simple way  ... before the problem is solved in general (by SE developers).

[Nathan]

Alrighty, we have a better workaround for now:

1) Go to Project > Project Properties... > Tools.
2) Select "Build" in the list of tools.
3) Check "Beep on completion"

Bizarre. But it works if you can live with a beep.

We'll be looking into using the same mechanism used for beeping for everything else that needs to run post-build.

Let me know if that doesn't work for you.
Nathan

[hs2]

Sorry - didn't try my real life projects with v13 yet.
Is it now possible to run post-build commands for any build tool (sync'd to the finish of it) ?
That would be really great !
HS2

[Nathan]

I can *almost* guarantee that the bell hack will work for any build tool, but compile.e is full of some hairy code.

The important thing is that something calls _vsbuild_signal_init() to set up the necessary timers, etc. This is done directly if the project is using vsbuild, or by the AddVSBuildToCommandLine() function in other cases.

AddVSBuildToCommandLine() should be called if you turn on the bell, or if you ask for Verbose output (the checkbox above "Beep on completion").

Give the bell a shot when you have the time and hopefully it will work.
Nathan

[Musenka]

Yes, the bell works fine 
Thank you.
Very interesting solution!

[chrisant]

The "beep on completion" workaround doesn't appear as if it's going to work for me:

I have only one tool in my project:

• Build -- this invokes a particular build system, which determines dependencies and recursively builds everything starting from the current directory (which the tool sets as %rp).

I do not have a Compile tool, and given the way this build system works, I'm not even sure what I would make it do.
Without "beep on completion" checked for the Build tool, no errors show up in the Message List.
When I check "beep on completion", then the tool doesn't run -- it says this in the Build window:

C:\off\dev14\csi>c:\slick\win\vsbuild build -b C:\off\dev14\csi\coauth\coauth\CoAuthUncProv.cpp -beep C:\off\dev14\Office.vpw C:\off\dev14\csi\Csi.vpj -signal 9009
Command 'compile' not defined in project file 'C:\off\dev14\csi\Csi.vpj'

I don't have a "compile" command.  Nor can vsbuild be expected to figure out dependencies.  Furthermore, I want to build everything recursively from %rp, but "beep on completion" seems to make it want to build a single .cpp file.

Is there some other way I can get the errors to show up in the Message List properly?

Is a real fix coming in 13.0.1?

Thanks!
C

[Lee]

We have worked on this for the upcoming 13.0.1 release, it should work any for all build tools commands without any of the previously used workarounds to get both message list reporting and error-markers in buffers.

[hs2]

Great ! Can't wait for v13.0.1 ...
HS2

[chrisant]

Awesome, thanks, Lee!

[mrothman]

I've got 13.0.1 and this still seems flaky (but maybe I'm doing something wrong?)

I have a tool in the build menu (let's call it "foo").  I created my own Error Regular Expression to parse foo's output, which works nicely (and which incidentally includes a Macro added to the ErrorRE.xml file, as described in error.e).  When I run "foo" from the build menu, the first line of output says it's using vsbuild.  The errors can be parsed and followed correctly if I double click on them in the build toolbar.  But nothing shows up in the message list.

If I run set-error-markers, boom, they are all there.

Only other wrinkle - it was working without the call to set-error-markers for a few tries earlier today. I am of course scratching my head trying to figure out what might have changed.  Only thing I can remember doing is adding a context menu for the file type which is input for "foo", and that menu can also run foo by calling a macro which calls

execute('project_usertool foo')

However, I don't see how this could have much to do with it - and in any case, it doesn't work either when called directly from the build menu or from the context menu.  However, I will try removing the context menu, but I think that's a red herring...