Convert nmake makefile into Visual Studio 2005 project

Zathrus picture Zathrus · Sep 30, 2008 · Viewed 17.8k times · Source

We have some old C code here that's built with nmake.

Is there an automated way to pull the Makefile into Visual Studio 2005 and create a project? Some searching on MSDN indicates VS6 could do this, but it looks like VS7/8 dropped the feature.

If necessary I can build the project from scratch using the project.mak file as a reference, but for more complex projects this may not be viable.

Answer

Taylor Price picture Taylor Price · Sep 30, 2008

I have been heavily involved in a project at my company to do the same thing. I found that many of the old nmake based projects of our had many common settings. Because of that, I went the route of creating a custom project wizard.

It took several days of fooling around with it to get right, but has saved a lot of time. It has also allowed us to bring other devs into the effort of re-compiling in a manner that makes it easy for them, yet enforces many of the compiler settings we would like.

With the wizard, the steps of recompiling look much like:

1.) Create project.

2.) Compile and stomp out all errors and warnings.

3.) Add libraries that need to be linked in.

4.) Done.