The Visual Studio Coco Wizard

The Visual Studio^® Coco Wizard is an application to edit the CoverageScanner options for C/C++ and C# projects on Microsoft^® Visual Studio^® and related systems.

The add-in reads solution files (*.sln) and project files (*.proj and *.vcxproject) and modifies them.

These files are used by Visual Studio, Microsoft MSBuild, .NET Core, Visual Studio Code and other software.

How it works

From Visual Studio, the add-in can be started from the menu entry Tools > Coco Wizard. It is then automatically configured to edit the solution file of the currently active project.

You can start the add-in also from the Microsoft Windows start menu, under Squish Coco > Visual Studio Build Mode Configuration. Then, select the solution or project file that should be modified.

Using Coco Wizard

The Visual Studio Coco Wizard has the following steps:

1. File selection to select a solution or project file to edit either from the file system or from a list of recently used files.

   This step does not occur when the add-in is started from Visual Studio.

2. Modification / Copying to choose whether an existing build mode is edited or it is copied with a new name.

   It is useful to have separate build modes for building with and without coverage. Therefore, at the beginning, you should copy an existing build mode and add coverage flags to it.

3. Creation / Editing / Removal to choose whether to create a new build mode or to edit or remove an existing mode.

   In general, it is recommended to create a separate build mode for coverage. The build mode can be copied from a debug build mode or a release mode, depending only on the requirements of the project.

4. Selecting the options in a two-column display with CoverageScanner options (see CoverageScanner command line arguments).

   The list on the left side contains all possible options, and the one on the right contains the options that are activated for the build mode. The options can be dragged from left to right to activate them or from right to left to deactivate them.

   If an option requires a parameter, a dialog window to set it appears when it is dragged from the right. To change the parameter of an option at the right column, double-click it.

   Note that the order of the options matters. They can be rearranged with drag and drop.

5. Summary to check the actual list of selected options.

   If Visual Studio is running at this time, it will reload the .sln file and the project can be recompiled.