How can I make Visual Studio's build be very verbose?

Question

I need to get a hold of every flag, every switch used in the build process by the Visual Studio binaries. I tried to obtain a verbose output by using vcbuild, but I wasn't able.

What do I have to do to see everything performed by Visual Studio for me? It's not necessary to obtain the output in the build window. Anywhere would be fine.

Answer 1

1. Open the project properties dialog, then choose

   Configuration Properties → C/C++ → General

2. Change the setting for Suppress Startup Banner to No

3. The cl command line(s) will be shown in the output window.

Answer 2

Visual Studio 2008:

Go to menu Tools → Options then Project and Solutions → Build and Run section. You have a combo box for verbosity.

C++ compiler option (project properties):

• Preprocessor - Generate Preprocessed File for seeing the translation unit as generated by preprocessor
• Advanced - Show includes - display included file names at compiler output

Answer 3

Menu Tools → Options → Projects and Solutions → Build and Run → MSBuild project build output verbosity: Diagnostic

Answer 4

In Visual Studio go to your project and right click on it and select properties. In Linker there is a command line option. There you have all the options and you can add your custom ones. Add /VERBOSE and when linking Visual Studio will show a lot more information.

Answer 5

If you're running MSBuild, you can set the /v:diag flag.