# Slow Chat Archives > Slow Chat: Visual C++: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow >  [RESOLVED] Building dsw/dsp with devenv

## ABuenger

It would be great if dsw/dsp files could be build with devenv without having to convert the files.

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## borisj

That would be cool but expensive for us to maintain so many different file formats. Have you had issues with our dsw/dsp conversion?

Boris Jabes
Visual C++

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## ABuenger

No, opening and converting the project files works fine, but I continue to work with VS6 - atleast until SP1 is available - and only use VS2005 to check if my code compiles without warning and errors. I haven't decided yet wheter I compile the release with VS6 or VS2005. Any advise why I would want to compile it with VS2005 for x86?

mfc42u.dll and msvcrt.dll are preinstalled on every PC, so I don't have to ship them with my app which I would have to do if I use the mfc80 (or statically link them, which Microsoft says is bad for security fixes)

I'm also using a lot of libraries for code reuse which are shared between projects and a common problem - also for projects published on codeguru and other community sites - is that those libraries are used with VS6, 2002, 2003 and 2005.

So either Visual Studio directly, or even better a standalone tool should be available that convert from any input format to all output formats.

There are already some tools available to convert between some formats, so there is demand for this which the VC++ team should serve.

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## tarekmadkour

We do have a stand-alone tool that converts from dsp to vcproj (vcbuild.exe). The tool also builds .vcproj files from the command line.

You may be able to use vcbuild to automate the "convert / build" process.

The downside is that vcbuild does not convert .dsw files to .sln so you'll need to keep those persisted. But hopefully .dsw/.sln files are not constantly changing so that should not be a huge issue.

Thanks,

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## ABuenger

Thanks, but that doesn't address the issues someone has who develops a library with VS2005 which is also beeing used with VS6/2002/2003. Even if you only ship the headers and a libray and no sources you still have to compile it with previous versions.

This could be done with a xsl file for the project files, but better would be a Add-In for VS which saves a set of project files for the different VS versions.

This tool should also introduce a naming convention for the project (proj_vc60, proj_vc70, ...) and lib files.

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## tarekmadkour

Certainly, a converter that works between VC6/2002/2003/2005 is the ideal solution. Unfortunately, we don't have an out-of-the box solution for this problem. Some third party tools may exist (I know some that convert between VC6 and 2002 and maybe 2003), though.

We do recognize this as an issue, though. In the future, we do plan on moving to MSBuild as the build system for C++ and it is our intent to solve this problem at that time.

Thanks,

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