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In the same spirit as the question Can I download the Visual C++ Command Line Compiler without Visual Studio? I would like to see if it is easy to bundle the appropriate part of Visual Studio to build Universal App written in C++. Following the answer by @Alek to the aforementioned question, I managed to create an archive where I can basically unzip and use. But this is for traditional desktop (I would say, command-line) programs. I tried to do similar thing for Universal App and there are a couple of issues

  • The official way (i.e. what Visual Studio does under the hood) is to use MSBuild. Unfortunately, I do not know what are and how to get all of its dependencies. It seems to require significant configuration effort as well.
  • There is no documentation on how to build resources (e.g. generate C++ source and headers from XAML), how to generate the .appx. If possible, a Makefile template is very much appreciated.

The reason to ask for this is because Visual Studio failed me so many times. For instance, the November Update messed up my entire system; the SDK installer fail at 96% and rolled back. Previously, the upgrade to VS2015 (from 2013) also messed me up entirely. It seems that the only solution to these problems is complete uninstall. Having a portable archive where I can just unzip and restore my production environment back to health is something I would say extremely desirable.

Note: I do not care about the IDE. I only need the ability to build apps from source code on the command prompt.

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  • XAML? Is this C++ or C++/CLI? – Captain Obvlious Jan 06 '16 at 00:04
  • Just some notes: here are many more people who never have any problems with VS at all, so it might be a problem with your machine. Abandoning the easy way of doing things based on just that might not be the smartest thing to do. (also VS2015 is not an upgrade, it installs and runs seperately from VS2013 - well, it should). Msbuild source code is available so it might be possible to just build and use it. There likely is documentation about how to generate sources from xaml, but it will be along the lines of 'use this msbuild task'.. – stijn Jan 06 '16 at 08:24
  • @stijn I agree that we should choose easy way to do things. The problem here is that it is Microsoft that is making things difficult by releasing unreliable software. They should make it easy to start development; for example, the 5-min (download 200MB; unpack; develop) approach of Eclipse; not (download 10GB; wait 8 hours to install; if it fails, format the machine and reinstall). – An Hoa Jan 07 '16 at 18:23

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