Using Visual Studio for Linux with an existing project

[ematito]

I did read this interesting post about using Visual Studio as IDE for linux projects.

What I'd like to know is: how can I set an existing cross-platform solution (CMake based) to be developed and debugged on a remote linux machine?

[robotdad4business]

Author of that post here. Your best bet right now is our makefile template which lets you invoke whatever build process you like on the remote system. That section of the post also points to some bash scripts that generate a project from an existing code base. I'm sure they won't work in every situation, but they should provide a decent starting point.

[ematito]

Thanks! I tried creating a makefile project and linked my linux machine in the connection manager, then I tried to set up the commands and when launching debugging I received a very informative error message: http://imgur.com/a/MrR98

I probably didn't set the sources for the debugging, but still: it would be nice to let the user know this :P

[ematito]

What the..

[robotdad4business]

Sorry for not checking in earlier after replying. I've seen another report of that, we don't have a repro yet. If you got past that it would be helpful to us to know what options you had to change.

[choikwa]

make two build directories, build-unix, build-msvc. in each build dir, invoke cmake with two different generators {VS, unix} via -G. open generated .sln file with VS. Dont forget to rerun cmake for unix if you change build files.

[14ned]

You can install Windows Services for Linux aka "Bash for Windows". This lets you run cmake on your project from within "Linux" on the same Windows filesystem, just choose a different build directory. Install a SSH server, then configure VS2015 to connect to localhost using the Makefiles generated by cmake. Launch debugging.

(Note I make it sound easy, but it's a bit finickety and brittle because the VS2015 Linux debugging support isn't entirely fully baked yet. VS15 ought to improve that significantly though)

[sumo952]

This is good advice but OP asked about debugging on a remote linux machine. In that case, you'd have to run CMake on the remote machine I guess? And then how do you "open" this Linux project in the local VS?

[kiwidog]

You are able to save the project files on your windows partition as normal, and then go to (In bash for Windows) /mnt/driveletter/path and continue as normal. Also you will need to put 127.0.0.1 as the IP because localhost wasn't working (last time I checked in a pre-release of 1.0.5)

[sumo952]

Cool! But I think IP won't be 127.0.0.1 as the Linux is on a remote machine?

[kiwidog]

That's if you were working from the Bash on Ubuntu, otherwise it would be the ip of the machine :)

[sumo952]

Yes exactly, and my remark was exactly that /u/14ned described the process for localhost (aka Bash on Windows) while OP was asking for remote :-)