New Ice Builder for Visual Studio + Refreshed .NET Core Beta

bernard

If you create Ice applications with Visual Studio, you want to use Ice Builder for Visual Studio to compile your Slice files. And we have just released a new improved and streamlined Ice Builder for Visual Studio - Ice Builder 5.0.

With this 5.0 release, all the build logic and configuration are now in Ice Builder for MSBuild. You simply add the NuGet package zeroc.icebuilder.msbuild to your C++ or C# project: your Slice files are now recognized as source files, and get compiled to C++ or C# code with slice2cpp or slice2cs.

Ice Builder for Visual Studio remains a Visual Studio extension available from the Visual Studio marketplace. It is now just a front-end to configure Ice Builder for MSBuild within the Visual Studio IDE.

The primary advantage of this new pair of Ice Builders is that you no longer need to install the Ice Builder for Visual Studio extension to compile your project or solution from the command-line with MSBuild: you just need the zeroc.icebuilder.msbuild NuGet package, which can be easily downloaded on-demand from nuget.org.

Ice Builder 5.0 also includes support for .NET Core 2.0 projects. You can now use Visual Studio 2017 with the Ice Builder for Visual Studio extension to create .NET Core 2.0 projects, and then build the same projects on Windows, Linux or macOS with MSBuild and Ice Builder for MSBuild.

Doing so requires a refreshed version of the zeroc.ice.net beta package: for now, you need version 3.7.1-beta1, available from our beta NuGet repository. See https://zeroc.com/downloads/ice#dotnet-core for installation instructions, and https://github.com/zeroc-ice/ice-demos/tree/3.7.1-rc/csharp for demo C# programs for .NET Core 2.0, created with the new Ice Builders.

Please give them a try, and let us know how these new Ice Builders work for your projects!

All the best,
Bernard