Visual Studio 2017/2019 extension to integrate Conan C/C++ package manager functionality into any existing project.

The current task is to provide package management comparable to whan NuGet provides for .NET projects.

Plugin development is now being resumed after being stagnant for the past year.

The overall goal of the plugin is for Visual Studio to be able to execute Conan automatically as-needed based on the currently loaded solution/project/configuration. Over time, this could grow to a lot of convenience operations. However, the primary (first) objective is to run conan install which will generate conanbuildinfo.props and satisfy the dependencies.

Thus, the first requirement is to provide users a mechanism for mapping each Solution/Project/Configuration to a corresponding conan install command. A strategy has been chosen for this, and is being discussed here: conan-io#5

Overall, future features and should try to use a similar configuration-file-based strategy to provide maximum configurability and flexibility to the user of the plugin, by making any new conan-related-operations exposed in any toolbar menus and right-click menus configurable and composeable. This is particular important in the near-term while we are still deciding how the parts should work together, so that new workflow ideas can be tested without requiring code changes and rebuilds of the plugin.

To use the plugin, open the Conan.VisualStudio.sln file using the Visual Studio 2017 and invoke the Run command on the developer machine (we aren't providing the installer packages yet). It will create an isolated Visual Studio environment and load the plugin.

To use the Conan executable on your local system, the plugin needs to know where the Conan executable is. It will try to detect that automatically from your PATH environment variable, but you could set that manually for cases when the automatic detection doesn't work.

To set the Conan executable location, enter "Tools → Options" menu and select "Conan" settings category.

The plugin will install the dependencies using the conan install command. To do that, ensure that your conanfile.txt is placed in the same directory as your project file or in any of its' parent directories, and then invoke the "Tools → Invoke AddConanDepends" menu command.

It will call conan install --build missing --update using the visual_studio_multi generator. After that, you'll need to integrate the resulting property files into your Visual Studio project.

If you need any diagnostic information, please look for conan/conan.log file in the directory with your conanfile.

The visual_studio_multi generator creates the conan/conanbuildinfo.props property file that should be integrated into your vcxproj file. To do that, use the "Tools → Integrate into project" menu command. It will automatically add the corresponding <Import> item into the vcxproj file.

If you need to build the generated project without Visual Studio (e.g. on a build server machine), execute the following terminal commands:

$ cd [directory with conanfile]
$ conan install . -g visual_studio_multi --install-folder ./conan -s compiler.version=15 --build missing --update
$ msbuild [usual params here]

After calling conan install that way, msbuild will be able to find all the dependencies, because it'll be able to use the Conan-generated conan/conanbuildinfo.props file.

To build the Conan Visual Studio plugin, either with Visual Studio (nothing unusual here), or use MSBuild:

$ msbuild /p:DeployExtension=false

This project uses xUnit.net tests, please use any compatible test runner to run the automated tests.