How to use C# msbuild/xbuild system with ament?

[Lennart Na]

Hi,
I'm looking for some information/documentation and examples on how to integrate the msbuild/xbuild system that is usually used with C#, into ament.
According to http://design.ros2.org/articles/ament.html this should be possible.

At the moment I'm simply using a cmake custom target that invokes the xbuild system on linux. ( See https://github.com/firesurfer/rclcs/blob/master/CMakeLists.txt )

What I want to achieve is:

• Calling msbuild/xbuild directly or with a nice looking call from cmake
• Export the resulting dll's / exe's by the setup script that is created in the install folder by ament so you don't need to go into the install/bin folder
• Export/set the environment variable MONO_PATH (On Windows I think you should use an application config file)

Lennart

[Dirk Thomas]

Hi Lennart,

wrapping the `xbuild` invocation in a CMake project is certainly an option. It just implies that you need CMake which you don't really use and which adds some overhead to the build of that package.

A cleaner way would be to introduce a new build type to `ament_tools`, e.g. `xbuild` (https://github.com/ament/ament_tools/blob/24a11a523cf900ce3880c62ed79127cc2177a4a4/setup.py#L51-L55). Currently the tool only knows how to process CMake and Python packages (https://github.com/ament/ament_tools/tree/master/ament_tools/build_types) but it can be easily extended to support arbitrary other tools. Each of the build type files simply implements the process you want to apply when building / testing / installing / uninstalling a package. By implementing support for `xbuild` in `ament_tools` you gain the option to pass optional `xbuild` specific arguments from the command line. E.g. for CMake you can specify CTest specific argument to customize the testing process.

Cheers,

- Dirk

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