Improving dmd development on Windows for visual studio

[12345swordy]

There should be a separate d official project that holds the visual studio project files for dmd, druntime, phobos, etc.
There is a github project on this already: https://github.com/rainers/dlangvs why not make this official by forking it?
That way, we can remove the visual studio solution file from dmd and add it to the newly created visual studio solution github project for dmd, which then can be improve upon and maintain by other people.

What other ideas do you have with regards to improve the dmd development experience for window users?

[Imperatorn]

Yes please. This would not only make ir more approachable, but would probably also lead to Visual D getting some love.

[rainers]

The VS projects for druntime and phobos at https://github.com/rainers/dlangvs are mere wrappers around the makefiles, so the main benefit of these projects is that they populate the solution with the D files found in the respective folders. This is done using wildcard search, but unfortunately this functionality is deprecated in recent updates of VS (it displays a warning, but still works). (The test suite project is not populated with all test files, because that made loading the solution very slow).

The current projects are rather tolerant with respect to changes to building and files to compile, but are also pretty limited. For example, changing options doesn't do anything to the makefile builds. If necessary making changes to these projects from within VS isn't so easy, because a number of things break when VS saves them. So the projects need to be manually edited, but the msbuild framework is hardly known to a lot of people.

I would currently consider it a burden on the active maintainers to keep these projects up to date.

[Imperatorn]

You should get some support with this. Idk how atm tho. Being a one-man army is challenging.

[12345swordy]

Would it be better to use dub to generate the visual d projects for dmd then? @rainers