Makefiles in Borland C++ 3.1?

Back in the early 90s, I was working on a product built in Borland C++ 3.1

Working on a project was quite simple, but building a version was a nightmare: Borland had forgotten to give us a make utility for their projects, so we had to open the .prj one by one, in the right order, build it and collect the results. Well, to be true, Borland had a make utility, but it didn't accept .prj files - it only converted them into makefiles loosing some properties.

As the product grow larger, so did the daily build process. Having to build over 20 libraries and 8 to 10 applications was not a nice way to end a day. So a nice little utility was born: bccc - I named it over bcc (Borland C Compiler).

bccc would take by argument a project, open it with Borland GUI, send the WM_COMMAND messages that issued a build operation (simulating the key presses), wait for the result (monitoring the appearance of a close button, if memory serves me well), collect the results peeking from the GUI result listbox, and issued a WM_QUIT to exit the application.

We could now produce our make file. It was a command file with a bunch of bccc commands, one for each project.

It wasn't much, but that what we had back then :)