Professional Xcode® 3

Chapter 17. Building Projects

WHAT'S IN THIS CHAPTER?

• Starting and stopping builds

• Selecting a build target and settings

• Navigating build transcripts, warnings, and errors

• Understanding build settings and build configurations

• Editing build settings

• Distributing builds to a workgroup

Building projects is Xcode's ultimate ambition. It might not be yours — you probably want your finished application to run flawlessly and be wildly popular. While Xcode does provide additional tools for debugging and performance analysis that are covered in subsequent chapters — sorry, it can't do much about your application's popularity — its central purpose is to faithfully compile and assemble your finished application.

This chapter explains how to choose what you want built and how to start, stop, and customize the build process. This chapter also explains build settings and build configurations, which are used to customize everything from compiler options to packaging, so your products come out just the way you want them to.

Starting a build is relatively simple, and is described first. After that, the chapter covers targets selection, the build window preferences, and build locations. Builds often don't go flawlessly, so the next sections describe how to dig into the details of your build transcript and navigate any warnings or errors.

The bulk of this chapter explores the build settings: a multi-dimensional hierarchy of named values that control everything from the name of your application to what compiler ...