Building the IVI.NET Driver

A Nimbus driver solution consists a several Visual Studio projects. The topic Visual Studio Projects for an IVI.NET Driver discusses each of these projects. When these projects are created and added to the driver solution, Nimbus adds the appropriate build dependencies so that the projects are built in the proper order when the entire driver solution is built.

For example, the unit test project obviously relies upon the driver project, so Nimbus adds to the unit test project a dependency on the driver project. This ensures the driver project is built before the unit test project is built. Similarly, the driver setup project requires the driver and the help project to be built before it can be built, so it has dependencies on both of those projects.

To view the project dependencies

If you have properly set up the solution build configurations as explained in the topic topic Required Visual Studio Configuration Changes, then building the driver solution in the Debug configuation will result in all of the projects except for the help and setup projects being built. to be built. The build step for compiling the help file and the driver installer is intentionally separate from the build step for compiling other projects in the driver solution because the help and installer projects are typically built less often than the driver project and the unit test projects.

Important
Before building the driver, it is important to properly set up the Visual Studio solution build configurations. Visual Studio does not provide programmatic access to these settings, so Nimbus is unable to automatically configure them. The topic Required Visual Studio Configuration Changes provides details on what exactly must be done before building.

When the build is performed, the output files will be placed in the appropriate bin\Debug or bin\Release subfolder of each project in the solution.

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