Building CoreApp outside Visual Studio #1
Description
Hi!
Thanks for having so much good material on building simple UWP apps using CMake! Extremely useful stuff. I am mostly interested in cross-platform development, hence CMake, but I would like to omit installing a full blown VS solely to get an empty project building. I would like to compile and debug the code using Visual Studio Code, so pretty much building from the command-line using CMake only (preferably Ninja, but I'll bite my fingers if MSBuild is the only way).
I took your CoreApp as my starting point, as BlankApp had extra flaming hoops to jump through. Ultimately I would like to start UWP development with a UWP console app. No GUI, no events, no XAML, no async, just old-school int main() that can be submittted to the store.
As a grand final goal, I'd like to make CMake itself go to the store, preferably even as a console app, because the MSIX Packaging Tool just doesn't cut it, I can't get the package manifest right and update PRI using the tools, so I thought I'd bake it properly into the build scripts of CMake itself and mainline the changes.
Do I understand correctly that the executable can only be debugged when deployed? If I build the app and just try to launch the resulting exe, it bails with an exception.
I would be happy to collaborate with you in putting together samples and enchance the CMake part if needed to get Store compatible UWP samples to build outside VS. I'd need just a little guidance on how UWP deploying works. Most likely it will need a little footwork to either create helper scripts calling makeappx.exe et al or even better, bake it into CPack.