Visual Studio 2022 Preview 2 and the v143 platform toolset
Wednesday 21st July, 2021
Visual Studio 2022 Preview 2 was released by Microsoft last week.
One of the changes included in Preview 2 is the addition of the Visual Studio 2022 specific v143 platform toolset (Preview 1 used the v142 platform toolset from Visual Studio 2019). Support for the v143 toolset has already been added to Visual Lint 8.0 and will soon become available within both VisualLintConsole and VisualLintGui in Visual Lint 8.0.3.
As part of that change, 8.0.3 will include a PC-lint Plus indirect file for Visual Studio 2022, and the Configuration Wizard and Options Dialog will both offer Visual Studio 2022 projects as an option:
co-rb-vs2022.lnt has been added to to support Visual Studio 2022.Furthermore, since Preview 1 was released last month we have been gradually plugging away (no pun intended!) in the Visual Lint development branch, adding support for the VS2022 VSSDK COM interfaces along with new x64 build configurations where needed.
It's worth noting that although named identically, the Visual Studio 2022 interfaces differ somewhat from their 32 bit predecessors so a lot of boilerplate changes have been required. However as we (fortunately, it turns out) use an in-house Visual Studio interfacing library to wrap the Visual Studio COM interfaces we use those changes have been largely localised to the support library itself - and that's made things a lot easier than it might otherwise have been.
Once that was done we turned our attention to the Visual Studio plugin project itself, by adding x64 build configurations to it and then gradually working through the code fixing the inevitable compilation and linker errors (mostly by conditionally compiling out 32 bit specific code, such as that relying on the add-in interfaces used with Visual Studio versions prior to Visual Studio 2015).
We finally got a clean build on a dev machine this morning, and then turned our attention to adding a VS2022 VSIX package project, which is necessary to deploy a plugin (or "extension", in Microsoft terminology) to Visual Studio 2022.
A few tweaks, some headscratching and more tweaks later, and just after lunch today Visual Lint not only successfully loaded under debug in a Visual Studio 2022 experimental instance for the first time but also analysed its first project under that environment:
Of course getting the plugin running under debug is just the first step - there is still much to do before we can release a public build with a Visual Studio 2022 compatible version of the Visual Studio plugin.
That said, getting to this point is hugely encouraging, so today has definitely been a good day.
