Visual Studio Rules Files - Dependencies

I had written about the ability of Visual Studio to incorporate rules to define custom build steps. In the meantime I have found out, that this feature is also part of Visual Studio 2005. It worked quite nicely, only the dependencies were not working as expected. The rule calls a tool which creates a HPP-file with the same base name as the input file. That files is then included into a C++-source file, so the build step should only happen after I changed the shader file and then the C++-file should also be translated.

But it didn't work like this. The tool ran with every build and the C++-file was not rebuild, so I had to build twice after a change to the shaders. Today I finally found where the problem was. One of the properties of the build rule is the output. A short help text says, that it is commonly set to "$(InputName).<new extension>" and that is, what I also used (I obviously used .hpp as extension). As the dependencies didn't work as if the output file never existed I guessed, that I had not specified the correct file. As the file name was correct, it could only be the directory and that was indeed the case. It seems, that the default directory is the intermediate directory where the C++-compiler places the obj-files. So today I changed the output to "$(InputDir)\$(InputName).hpp" and then it worked. This is really a nice feature, if only the documentation wasn't that terrible.