microsoft / microsoft/vscode-cmake-tools

Improve automatic setup of MSVC dev environment with presets

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#4,225 1 comment 5 reactions 2 assignees Claimed by @hanniavalera View on GitHub
enhancement
Dominant language
TypeScript
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Description

### Brief Issue Summary

Feedback from Customers:

There should be better feedback about automatic setup of MSVC dev environment with presets. It took me a long time to figure out that I needed to set CMAKE_CXX_COMPILER to cl.exe explicitly in my CMakePresets.json for it to work. Since this is not needed for typical command line / CI workflows where you set up the environment manually (and rely on CMake to correctly guess that you want to compile with MSVC), some help from IDE is desirable here.

From what I can tell, Visual Studio and even JetBrains CLion do not need "CMAKE_CXX_COMPILER": "cl" as an explicit hint in the preset to provide the MSVC environment setup, just the toolset/architecture keys are enough.

Would it be possible to drop this requirement in cmake-tools, reducing friction with presets authored by/for other tools/IDEs?

### CMake Tools Diagnostics

```shell

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### Debug Log

```shell

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### Additional Information

_No response_

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