Using MSBuild in VC++ 2010 to do custom preprocessing on files

I am trying to insert a custom preprocessor into the VC++ 2010 build-pipe after the regular pr开发者_运维知识库eprocessor has finished, so far i figured that the way of doing this is via MSBuild.

To this point I wasn't able to find out much more, so my questions are:

• Is this possible at all?
• If so, what do I need to look at, to get going.

If you are talking about the c/c++ preprocessor, then you are probably out of luck. AFAIK, the preprocessor is built into the compiler itself. You can get the compiler to output a pre-processed file and then you MIGHT be able to send that through the compiler a second time to get the final output.

This may not work anyway due to the code being produced, at least in previous versions of cl.exe, doesn't seem to be 100% correct (white space gets mangled slightly which can cause errors).

If you want to take this path, what you'd need to do is have an MSBuild 'Target' that runs before the 'ClCompile' target. This new target would have to run the 'cl.exe' program with all the settings that 'ClCompile' usually sends it with as well as the '/P' option which will "preprocess to a file". Then you need to run your tool over the processed file and then finally feed these new files into 'ClCompile'.

If you need any more info just reply in the comments and I'll try to add some when I get the time (this question is rather old, so i'm not sure if it's worthwhile investing more time into this answer).