Hi Tim,

In my project I use the macro __TIME__ as a proxy for version number to keep track of when the binary was built. 

However unless I clean or rebuild the whole project, the .cpp file containing the __TIME__ macro is not recompiled and so the compile time is not updated. 

Is there any way in Visual Micro to force re-compile of a particular .ino or .cpp file without recompiling the whole project each time?

Thanks

n

Hi Tim,

Thanks for the extensive reply - you have given me a few things to think about. This is probably not something worth making mods to Visual Micro for - so that leave me your 1 and 2... 

1) Certainly works when done manually. I have tried to automate this using the VS Prebuild Events to change the dates on the relevant file but it looks to me as if the prebuild events are not being fired. Do they work with Visual Micro? There is no sign of it in the verbose compile log.... I understand that they are only fired when there are changes to the build but even then it does not seem to fire...??

2) If I put the following into the extra project defines:

DefineCompileTime __TIME__

then how can I get the time into a char string? Is it something like this I need? I can't make it work.

#define TOSTRING( X ) #X
char CompileTime[] = TOSTRING(DefineCompileTime);

Don't spend too much time on this one Tim - I thought it might just have been a simple switch I was missing...!

Thanks

n

I think I have a solution

You can add an arduino pre-build hook (action) to a board.txt or platform.txt that runs a batch file to force update of a source file.

The actions are documented in the arduino 3rd party hardware spec and allow you to pass variables sch as build path etc. so the same hook could handle multiple projects if file "x.h" exists

You have to look at one of the compiler patterns to see the build folder property. The. Use that instead of hard coded paths