CEF Forum

Hi all!

We are currently setting up our build infrastructure newly after a security incident and I have a question concerning the licensing of Visual Studio 2019 on build machines.
We are a big company and cannot use the cheaper VisualStudio licenses and we are aware that every developer using Visual Studio has to be licensed.

We now set up the build machines and as we also have to install Visual Studio 2019 for our CEF Builds (and other native builds for our product) we would have to provide licenses for each and every build server we have (as we always are currently installing the IDE).
Is this really necessary? Do we really have to install the IDE and could we save some licences if we only install the build tools with the needed packages like C++ desktop and MFC/ATL?

Thx for the answers in advance!

Phylanx

You can install Visual Studio 2019 Community Edition, which is free. CEF builds just fine with it, providing you are setting up the required packages (ATL, graphics, C++ compilers, minimum SDK etc.) as usual.
VS 2019 Community can coexist peacefully with other (relatively new) VS versions, even another 2019 Professional edition. I have such a setup and, except disk, I never had any troubles.

You can create a zip archive from a VS install and use that on builders. See https://source.chromium.org/chromium/ch ... stalled.py and https://bitbucket.org/chromiumembedded/ ... figuration

Hi thanks for the quick answers.

@ndesktop:
As written in my post we are a big company and not allowed to use the community edition.
We are no students or private persons, we also do not meet the other criterias (we have over 250 PCs and more than the revenue limit).

As JCEF/CEF itself is open source (and therefore qualified for CommunityEdition usage) we also build other artefacts which are not open source.

@Marshall:
I don't know if only the "not usage" of the installer makes using the binaries legal ^^

Thanks so far, I guess we have to pay then for the licenses.

Would it work to buy some eleventy-core Xeon or Threadripper servers so one server can do multiple builds? You can edit the ninja line of the build script to limit the cores used to something reasonable like 4-6. 6 cores = 10 simultaneous builds on a 64-core threadripper. Have different builds go to different SSDs since there's so much file I/O.