Primary repository on GitHub.

DSPtoVCXPROJ

What is this?

C/C++ projects in Visual Studio use a project file to store the properties to use on the compiler, linker, etc. Since Visual Studio 2010, the project files have used the extension .vcxproj and use MSBuild. Between Visual Studio .NET (2002) and Visual Studio 2008, the project files used the extension .vcproj and use VCBuild. Visual Studio 2010 and later can convert these .vcproj project files to .vcxproj project files automatically.

But before Visual Studio .NET, we had Visual Studio 6.0 and earlier. They used project files with the extension .dsp. These could be converted to .vcproj by Visual Studio between .NET and 2008, but Visual Studio 2010 dropped this support and also has no way to convert those .dsp project files to .vcxproj project files.

That is where this application comes in. This is an application written in C# to try to convert .dsp project files to .vcxproj project files. It tries to convert as much as possible, but it will ignore certain parts that are not applicable to modern Visual Studio projects. It will ignore any options that are already defaults, reducing how much extra the files contain. It makes very few sanity checks on the incoming data and because it only converts the project file, it makes no guarantee that the output project file is going to build.

Note that this application does not handle the other portion of a project: the workspace/solution file. If there becomes demand for it, it could be handled, but for the time being, converting .dsw workspace files to .sln solution files is not done.

How to use it?

This application is a .NET 7.0 C# program. If you want to build it from the source code, you will need to use Visual Studio 2022 and make sure you have the .NET 7.0 SDK installed. If you just want to run the pre-built binary, you will need the .NET 7.0 runtime.

The application is a simple command line program. It takes a single argument, the path to the .dsp project file you wish to convert. The resulting .vcxproj project file is placed in the same directory as the .dsp file. You can either run it from the command line (ideal in case there is an error) or you can just drag the .dsp file onto the program.

What to do if it doesn't work?

Testing this application is hard, mostly because finding projects that still have only .dsp project files and not .vcproj or .vcxproj project files is hard. I've tested it on a handful of .dsp project files that I had and used that to try to fix any bugs, but there is always a possibility that the program will encounter something it fails on.

To try to prevent failures, I've utilized the old MSDN documentation for Visual Studio 6.0, the current Microsoft Learn documentation for Visual Studio (which covers, 2015, 2017, 2019 and 2022, as of this writing in August of 2023), as well as the help output of the various programs from both Visual Studio 6.0 and Visual Studio 2022. In some cases, there has been conflicting documentation, such as the help output not listing a flag that the MSDN documentation lists, or one of them listing a flag that the other doesn't, etc.

In case you encounter a .dsp project file that does fail, please let me know about it so I can handle it. You can submit a bug report in one of the following ways:

• Submit an issue via GitHub's issue tracker
• Contact me on Discord: username cyberbotx
• Email me: [email protected], please use the subject line DSPtoVCXPROJ.

License

The MIT License (MIT)

Copyright (c) 2023 Naram "CyberBotX" Qashat

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy
of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal
in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights
to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell
copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is
furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all
copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR
IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY,
FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE
AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER
LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM,
OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE
SOFTWARE.