Visual Studio 2019 allows C++ developers to target both Windows and Linux (including the Windows Subsystem for Linux) from the comfort of a single IDE. Visual Studio 2019 version 16.7 Preview 3 introduces two features specific to Linux development: improved build incrementality for MSBuild-based Linux projects, and support for a wider range of Linux distributions and shells.

There are two ways C++ developers can target Linux systems from Visual Studio. Our recommendation for anything cross-platform or with an eye to open-sourcing is our native support for CMake. This allows you to leverage the same source code and build scripts to target multiple platforms. Alternatively, you can create a MSBuild-based Linux project for a familiar Visual Studio experience.

Improved build incrementality for MSBuild-based Linux projects

You can now leverage Ninja for faster incremental builds in MSBuild-based Linux projects. To enable building with Ninja, navigate to Property Pages > General and set “Enable Incremental Build” to “With Ninja”.

Make sure you have ninja installed on your Linux system. You can install ninja on Debian-based Linux systems with the following commands:

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install ninja-build

We tested Ninja’s build performance with a MSBuild-based Linux project that contained 1000 .h files and 1000 .cpp files. Ninja led to faster build times for both a full rebuild and a build where one header file was changed.

End to end build time for full rebuild (in min)End to end build time with one change (in min)Enable Incremental Build == With Ninja8:010:32Enable Incremental Build == No12:575:26

These tests were run against a local VM (Ubuntu 20.04) connected to Visual Studio over SSH, but you can leverage these improvements with both our SSH support and native support for WSL. As a reminder, in MSBuild-based Linux projects you can select your platform toolset (WSL or remote) via Property Pages > General > Platform Toolset.

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