I have an existing project that I compile on both Windows using Visual C++ 2008, and Debian Linux. This project uses a standard Visual C++ .vcproj file, and some .cpp and .h files. It does not rely on any Windows specific stuff. Just plain C++.
It compiles and run well on Linux, using a home made tool that reads the .vcproj file to generate a Makefile which is used with make to compile and link all files using g++.
The trouble is that with Visual C++ 2010 (and 2012), the format of the project files have changed. Even the name has been changed from .vcproj to .vcxproj. My home made tool cannot read this new project file to generate the Makefile.
Instead of upgrading the home made tool to support new project files, I was wondering if xbuild would be able to compile my Linux executable?
I tried first to compile my own (VC++2008) project, but xbuild complains that my project is a VS2003 project, which is not supported by xbuild. However when googling on this matter, I find that xbuild is supposed to support VS2005 project files. There are also some references to mdtool to support these old project files, but I seems to be integrated into xbuild now.
Furthermore, I tried to compile a Visual C++ 2010 example (HuoChess) got from the MSDN site. The result is
/Microsoft.Cpp.Default.props: Project file could not be imported, it was being
imported by [...] /HuoChessConsole/HuoChessConsole.vcxproj: Imported project:
"//Microsoft.Cpp.Default.props" does not exist.`
Now, this looks like the project file wants some Microsoft definitions of rules for the Cpp compiler. Should I fake these definitions to use gcc instead? How can I do this?
Is what I want to do ever possible with xbuild?
There is a project GCCBuild which you can use to build vcxproj projects in Linux. It simply uses same vcxproj but uses GCC to compile and build. There are multiple examples there too.
PS. I am the author of that project.
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I'm new to coding and Visual Studio. I know and understand how to create, save and compile a new C++ project in Visual Studio. I understand that a new VS project creates a solution file in the directory which then I can use to open the project, etc.
What I don't understand is how to compile a C++ project which doesn't have a VS solution file. I mean, do I have to manually create a project and import files and then build it?
Please take this GitHub project as an example. Under information, it clearly states the following:
Building
To build a static library (./lib/ompeval.a) on Unix systems, use make.
To enable -msse4.1 switch, use make SSE4=1. Run tests with ./test. For
Windows there's currently no build files, so you will have to compile
everything manually. The code has been tested with MSVC2013, TDM-GCC
5.1.0 and MinGW64 6.1, Clang 3.8.1 on Cygwin, and g++ 4.8 on Debian.
Now, what I don't understand is how do I build this project in my VS software so that I can successfully run it? Any help would be appreciated. Thank you.
As you said it, create a new project in Visual Studio and just import the source and header files. Looking at the makefile, there doesn't seem to be any pre or post build events so you can import the files and compile them right away (as long as the code is platform compatible ofc).
You may have to create multiple projects. One for the static library and one for the test files, since Visual Studio projects usually have one output type only. Mostly one of the presets: dynamic library (dll), static library (lib) or executable (exe).
I work in a project using Qt compiled with Visual Studio C++ compiler.
I noticed after migrating from VS2017 to VS2019 that when building the application, VS always find qrc cpp files as modified and try to rebuild them.
Is not happening for all projects though, only some unit tests.
Does someone notice this behavior?
I've had the same issues when upgrading from vc141 (2017) to vc142 (2019). It's old but the only post I found, so:
The difference in the toolkits is that in vc142 "Custom Build Tools" are now appended to include inherited values. If your project is configured to use a build tool projectwide by default (for example meta objects from QTs signal/slot), the compiler will try to do that as well when trying to rcc the qrc files, and ultimately failing without throwing an error.
Simply removing ;%(Outputs) in Properties->Custom Build Tool->General->Outputs solved it for me.
I downloaded cpptest from internet, and I want to build it using Visual Studio 2008.
The problem is that instead of .sln and vcproj file, Makefile.am is distributed, and I believe that all the all the necessary included file is included in the Makefile.am.
How to use Makefile.am to generate VS project files? I tried to use Cmake, but there is no CMakeList in the distribution.
Edit: Thanks to all the answers! There is a sln file distributed after all. But I am still interested to know the answer to my original question.
the visual studio project files for cpptest are in the win directory, not in the src directory where the makefile is..
edit
makefiles are meant to be used with GNU make. If you want that on windows, you can look at Mingw, GnuWin32 or Cygwin. But they also require gcc for compiling, so you won't really be using VS.
However, for most projects that do not have external dependencies it's no big deal if you do not have the VS project file: after all a makefile is just a list of the source files and some compilation options. To successfully build projects like cpptest, you could just create an emtpy VS project, add all source files to it, set output type to executable, build it and you're done. Eventually you can tune optimization options, but for the rest the default options will just do fine.
Go to win\VisualStudio.NET and you will find a VS solution file.
I just downloaded the archive and found the .sln file. It is under: /win/VisualStudio.NET. You can open that with VS2008 and update it, it should work.
I'm fairly new to C++ and an trying to figure out to use the TagLib library for a project I am working on. I'm working with unmanaged C++ in Visual Studio 2010 on Windows 7 64bit. I've never used an external library before so I'm very confused on how to go about this.
From this blog entry I got the libtaglib.a and taglib.dll files. I ran across this SO question on how to use TagLib, but it deals with QT Creator, not Visual Studio and I'm not knowledgeable enough about the subject to understand what is being said to translate it into what needs done for Visual Studio.
So, some questions:
Is it even possible to do this with unmanaged code?
What exactly is the function of a .a file?
Most importantly, how do I go about using the taglib.dll in my program??
I've been all over Google looking for a way to do this, but my major problem is that everything I run across is over my head. Please let me know if more info is required. Any help is very much appreciated! Thanks!
I seem to have gotten it working successfully. Here's a rough outline of what I did:
1.) I used CMake to generate the Visual Studio solution.
2.) I attempted to build the tag project in the VS solution, but it failed.
3.) I made the corrections to a few source files as outlined here: http://old.nabble.com/taglib-fails-to-compile-with-MS-VC%2B%2B-2010-td29185593.html
4.) I built the tag project again in release mode. This time it was successful.
5.) I copied the resulting dll, def, and lib files to the same directory as the source files for my project.
6.) I copied the header files from the taglib source to a subdirectory in my project (not sure if this entirely good practice)
7.) In my project settings, I set the subdirectory with the header files as an additional include directory.
8.) I added the dll, exp, and lib files to my project by just going to Add>Existing Item.
9.) I added some code from the taglib examples and built it. Everything worked so I think I got it.
One caveat I ran into, since the DLL was built in release mode, my project had to be run in release mode or it would crash. I'm guessing that if I replaced the DLL with one built in debug mode I could run my program in debug mode, but I have not tried this.
You cannot use libraries specific to GCC (you can tell because they have .a extensions) with Visual Studio. You will have to build the library from source in order to use it with MSVC. Once you have done that it's a simple matter of adding the .lib generated from the build process to your project and things should work out of the box. (Note that it's a .lib you need whether you're compiling for dynamic linking or not -- doesn't matter in msvc land)
EDIT -- after looking at TagLib itself --
In order to compile TagLib you'll need to get the CMake build system, and TagLib itself, and have CMake build you a visual studio solution. Using that solution you'll be able to build the .libs and .dlls you need. Note that because TagLib is a KDE library, you'll probably need to also build some QT bits in order for everything work work successfully. However, I don't have specific experience with the library so I'm not going to be all that helpful here.
Yo do not have to recompile the source (to create the .lib file) if you have the .dll file. With dumpbin /exports and lib (both came with Visual Studio) yo can create a lib that you can link with your application. In this link you can see a nice explanation: http://www.coderetard.com/2009/01/21/generate-a-lib-from-a-dll-with-visual-studio/
But as Billy Said, probably you would need other parts of QT to use this library.
I'm working on a little game called freegemas, it's an open source version of the classic Bejeweled written in C++ and using gosu as the graphic API. I've been developing it under Ubuntu Linux as usual, but the other day I wanted to give it a try and I compiled it on Windows using Visual Studio 2005 (which I had never used before). The program worked flawlessly.
To compile it on Windows I manually copied all the source and header files to a new project on MSVC, but I would like to adapt the SVN so I don't have to recreate the project every time I want to compile it.
Therefore, the question would be: What's the best way of organizing the svn so I can have, on the one hand, a Makefile to compile the project in Linux, and, on the other side, the MSVC project's files? Right now I've got a simple folder called trunk with all header, source and resource files on it.
I've never used Visual Studio before, so I don't know which files are the most important either. Maybe some of those files are auto-generated and do not need to be svn-versioned.
Thanks in advance.
You could just keep the project files in a seperate directory "winbuild" or similar. Still, to maintain them would require manual interaction (ie adding every new file manually). The only files you would need to upload to svn are the *.vcproj (for MSVC 2005/2008) and *.vcxproj (MSVC 2010).
Alternatively, you could opt for a cross-platform solution like CMake, which could generate makefiles and Visual Studio project files from a common CMakeLists.txt, which is the only "project file" that would have to be maintained (instead of your makefile). Especially for a simple (?) project like yours (some headers+sources). There would be no need to include any makefiles or vcproj files at all, just the CMakelists.txt file would suffice.
There are others like CMake (SCons, boost.jam, jam, premake, etc.)
It should be feasable, but requires some testing and trial-and-error.