How can I determine whether VS is currently building? - visual-studio-extensions

I am updating a VSIX extension that triggers a build to generate the .vcxproj.filters file.
I would like this to run as early as possible after loading the solution.
If the extension is already loaded, I can do this in the OnBeforeOpenProject method in a class derived from IVsSolutionLoadManager.
However, as extensions are now loaded asynchronously, if the solution was opened directly, then the extension doesn't load until some time after the solution. I can trigger the build in this case, but it cannot start the build as there is one already running, raising System.InvalidOperationException: 'The operation cannot be completed because a build is already in progress.'
I assume that Intellisense or similar is busy running a build in the background.
Ideally I would like to query the system in an async method to detect when this build has finished, so I can trigger my own build.
I could of course handle the exception and retry on a short timer, which I may also do, but I'd like to wait until I'm likely to succeed before trying.
My search-fu has failed me, so: how can I detect that VS is currently building?
Thanks.

Related

How does QProcess manages the resources when started?

Context
I'm trying to implement a sort-of orchestrator pattern for our applications.
Basically, we have three different and independent applications developped in Qt that communicate with each other using Web Socket. We'll call them "core", "business" and "ui". This is a flexibility aim as we can simply develop a new application in a more suiting technology and connect it to the others via the same communication protocole.
Now the idea is to have a simple launcher that allows us to specify which part to start. We launch this "orchestrator-like" application and it starts all required processes from a configuration file.
Everything is done in Qt currently (QML for the UI interfaces).
Initial Issue
I've made a custom class oriented towards reading the configuration file, preparing the processes, and starting them with their respective arguments.
This uses a std::map of QProcess related to their name in the configuration file and launch them using QProcess::start(<process_path>) method.
The catch is that everything went smoothly until recently. The sub processes are started and runs perfectly ; everything goes on as normal until we reach some point were the "ui" part crashes (usually an LLVM memory error or vector:: length error).
At first we thought about a memory leak or a code error but after much debugging we found that the application had no error whatsoever when we ran each part individually (without using the custom orchestrator class).
Question / Concerns
So, our question is: could it be that the QProcess:start() method actually shares the same stack with its parent? Three processes having the same parent, it would not be surprising than a vector of ~500 elements stored in each application can exceed the stack size when returned.
Information
We use MacOS Big Sur, IDE is Qt Creator, using Qt 5.15.0 and C++11.
Tried using valgrind but as read here and here, this seems a dead-end for now. The errors below were seen in the .crash file following the application exit.
libc++abi: terminating with uncaught exception of type std::length_error: vector
ui(2503,0x108215e00) malloc: can't allocate region :*** mach_vm_map(size=140280206704640, flags: 100) failed (error code=3) ui(2503,0x108215e00) malloc: *** set a breakpoint in malloc_error_break to debug LLVM ERROR: out of memory
Also tried to redirects or completly remove the application's output. First changing the setProcessChannelMode when starting the application, then with startDetached instead of start. Then, commented my Log method dumping log info into the corresponding Qt output (info/warning/critical/fatal/debug).
As suggested by #stanislav888, we could rewrite the application manager part in bash scripts and it would probably do the trick but I'd like to understand the root issue to avoid future mistakes.
It looks like a bad design. Application running and orchestrating through bash or PowerShell script looks much more better.
But anyway.
You could try to suppress orchestrated applications output and see what happen. The programs output might flood memory and make crash.
You must check what particular trouble cause the crash. Use memory "coredump" and system error messages to understand the all problem details.
I sure the community need that details. Because "оut of memory", "stack depth exceeded" and same errors make big difference.
Try to write bash or PowerShell script which does the same workflow as the Qt application. Hope it is not hard. But it will help you to figure out the issue.
At least you can run this script from the application.

Is there a faster way to refresh my module changes?

I am using a module called TimeIsTime (https://www.azerothcore.org/catalogue-details.html?id=342405971) to accelerate the day/night cycle in game.
So far, I made some changes on it for my own usage, but each time I had to recompile my worldserver to get the changes recorded, is there a faster way ?
I saw someone use the reload [modulename] command in the worldserver prompt to refresh it at runtime, but I didn't managed to get the same result.
I had no luck trying to find the information on the Wiki page.
Any solution ?
Thanks
Any changes to the source code of a C++ module require a full re-run of cmake and a clean build. There is no way to bypass this that i am aware of.
As an alternative the Eluna engine allows the execution of Lua code which can be changed and loaded at runtime.

Analogue of background thread in VSIX project?

Basically, I'm trying to carry out a number of tasks while a Visual Studio instance is running.
I have not been able to find anything yet in the Visual Studio SDK reference which is analogous to a background thread or IsRunning or anything like that. All I can do so far is respond to very specific events such as the view changing or the cursor being moved.
I don't even understand what event fires when the Visual Studio instance finishes loading.
Surely there must be something pretty big that I'm missing here? What manages the lifecycle of a Visual Studio instance?
So nothing prevents you from launching a background thread and doing work there. All sorts of components do that all the time. There are some ways you can register your package to load in various scenarios, and from there you could always launch a thread.
Be careful of course with any of these -- if everybody did "I'll run a background thread once VS loads", your CPU cores would be very, very busy! There's an older concept in VS called the "idle loop" where some code can be registered to run whenever the UI thread doesn't have a message to pump, and the internal joke is that the idle loop is never idle.

Errors showing in Qt application - how to not display them in Release

A Qt project gives a number of errors - that I do not actually consider errors I think:
Some examples:
Fontconfig error: "/etc/fonts/conf.d/65-khmer.conf", line 32: out of memory
// ?
QGraphicsItem::ungrabMouse: not a mouse grabber
// i think happens when the mouse grab didn't quite happen, user moved too fast...
A few others
the first one seems it has an answer here https://askubuntu.com/questions/421891/fontconfig-error-out-of-memory
So I cannot fix it through software, the user must fix it... since it is system dependent...
Even built in release, these errors will still show up on command line... Since they do not cause the application to behave abnormally, I don't think the user should see them.
How can I build/deploy the application without these errors showing ?
ideally of course there would be no errors in a deployed application, but I don't know what I can do about those types of errors...
It is possible to redirect a stream (in this case stderr) after the fact using
freopen("/dev/null", "w", stderr);
Just place this in your main before any other code runs and you should be good. Keep in mind that this might need more work on Windows.
If the error message is posted through the Qt Message infrastructure (qDebug etc.) you can set a new message handler through the function qInstallMsgHandler.

Is it possible to have the entire contents of a class that tripped an error included in the stacktrace?

A lot of time can pass between the moment a stack trace is generated and the moment the stack trace is thoroughly investigated. During that time, a lot can happen to the file in question, sometimes obscuring the original error. The error might have been fixed in the meantime (overlapping bugs).
Is it possible to get Stacktraces that show the offending file at the time of the error?
Not elegantly, and you normally don't want the user browsing through code that's throwing unexpected exceptions anyway (open door to an attacker).
Usually, what happens in a dev shop is that the user reports an error, stack trace, and the build it occurred on. As a tester, you can grab that build from your archives (you ARE keeping an archive of all supported releases somewhere handy, RIGHT?), install, run, and try to reproduce the error, working with the user to provide additional info as necessary. I've seen very few bugs that couldn't be reproduced EVENTUALLY, even if it required running the program against a backup of the user's production database to do it.
As a developer, you can download that build's source code from your version control repository (you ARE using version control, RIGHT?), and examine the lines in the stack trace to try to discover the problem by inspection, and/or build and run it to reproduce the error. Then, you go back to the latest source version, build, and run the same steps (a UI automation system can help out here), and if you don't get the error, someone else already found and fixed it. If you still get the error, you also got an updated stack trace with lines that match the current build, allowing you to set your breakpoints and step through.
What KeithS said, plus there are ways to capture more helpful state information at the time of the Exception using the Exception.Data property. See http://blog.abodit.com/2010/03/using-exception-data-to-add-additional-information-to-an-exception/
While KeithS' answer as pretty much correct, it can be easier and more elegant than you think. If you can collect a dumpfile (instead of just a stack trace), you can use a Symbol Server and Source Server in combination with your debugger to automatically pull your correct-version code from source control.
For example: if you enable PDB output and source-server integration in MSBuild, and upload the resulting PDBs to a symbol server, Visual Studio can automatically load the correct source control from a TFS or SourceSafe repository based on the information in a minidump.

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