Is there a work around way to compile MFC files in Microsoft Visual C++ 2008 Express Edition
I'm not 100% sure, but I think that Windows Driver Developer Kit contains MFC 4.2 headers and libraries. I newer tested if this is enough to compile even simple MFC application using Express Edition of VS, but I guess this is your only chance.
Perhaps you can find an old copy of the visual studio environment?
Related
Is there a way to compile a Visual Studio 2012 project without having the VS installed? I need to compile C++ stuff for windows quite rarely and buying the product is not justified as there's no profit (community projects). In most of the cases the project and solution files will be available. If there's a way to compile the code with SDK, could you please share an example?
Thanks!
You can download visual studio express for free. Whenever you build a solution, the bin folder in your project folder will contain the compiled code.
http://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/downloads/download-visual-studio-vs.aspx
EDITED: (per MS website)
Visual Studio Express 2013 for Windows Desktop enables the creation of desktop apps in C#, Visual Basic, and C++, and supports Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), Windows Forms, and Win32.
Sign in to Visual Studio within 30 days with your Microsoft account to synchronize your settings across multiple machines and register your product.
Your best bet is likely going to be using msbuild which will allow you to build a solution or project without having Visual Studio installed.
If you have the free version VC++ Express installed (and thus the compiler toolchain), you might find it more interesting to use Eclipse CDT as IDE on top. At least the newer versions (I think since Helios) support using the native MS toolchain. You can import from native
VS projects also.
Eclipse is the more powerful IDE IMHO, and will additionally support other toolchains (either cross compiling, or Windows alternatives as MinGw GCC).
I'm trying to build an ATL based project on a build server. For that I have installed latest Windows SDK, however getting an error:
"Cannot open include file: 'atlbase.h': No such file or directory".
I have checked and to my surprise SDK does not contain ATL anymore. I cannot neither refactor ATL out on this stage nor install a VS on the build server. What would be an extra set up to build ATL?
ATL / MFC is installed by VS so, if you can't install VS, perhaps you could install it somewhere then take the headers, libs and DLLs and install them manually on your build server. Bit messy but it should work.
I had the same problem lately. If you're using an Express edition of Microsoft Visual Studio, you can't use ATL. I know it sounds illogical, but I guess there's no way of doing that. Some MSDN guy told me that in the license file of Microsoft Visual Studio Express Editions, there's a line about that. ATL is not free, so you have to buy it, or use Pro editions of Microsoft Visual Studio.
In Microsoft Driver Dev Kit, there's ATL classes, but they give weird linking errors. So, I guess you have to use Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Professional, or 2010 Professional.
I can help you more if there are more errors/problems about setting up ATL I guess.
Take care.
I'm unable to buy Visual studio. I'm just wondering if there's any other program besides Visual studio that can be used for developing C++ desktop applications.
Visual Studio has an Express edition which is free :)
For a non-Microsoft option, there is MinGW.
Microsoft offers free Windows SDK 7.1 with all compilers, headers and tools (nmake, all compilers, really good debugger etc.) for all supported Windows platforms. It, basically, full version of VS2010 tools without IDE (you have to use command-line one way or another). By the way, it has x64 compilers that are not shipped with VS2010 Express.
As an IDE I find Eclipse to be terrific. The amount of features and level of their customization are simply amazing and very useful. You can, most likely, configure Eclipse to run MS SDK command-line tools from it, but I haven't checked it myself.
You can download Visual Studio Express 2010 from Microsoft, it is free.
Can't go wrong with Visual Studio Express. It's free.
Ofcourse Visual studio express should be easy and free.
And if you need something to use in linux - http://qt.nokia.com/products/platform/qt-for-linux-x11/
another non-msft option is Eclipse:
http://eclipse.org/cdt/
Cygwin plus Cygwin Ports gives you a good approximation of the Linux development environment, for free, including the MinGW option (i.e., using GCC to create native Windows executables), Mono, KDevelop etc. etc..
Sharp Develop, DEVcpp, Mono D
but Visual Studio Express works just fine
QT is fine and cross-plateform. There is a QTCreator IDE with MinGW but you can use a plugin for eclipse to draw your application via eclipse CDT.
Qt. You can download latest versions here: http://www.qt.io/download/
I downloaded open-source version of Qt from the site and have compiled it with nmake, but I'm having trouble using it in my projects. It seems that Visual Studio can't find the Qt headers, even though I added the paths to my PATH, INCLUDE, and LIB variables. I tried installing the Qt Visual Studio add-in but it only supports Visual Studio 2008.
Has anyone gotten Qt to work with Visual Studio 2010? Or do I have to wait until Qt 4.7 is officially released for Visual Studio 2010 support?
Either download the pre-built vs2008 package or build it using cmake's vs2008 profile and then open the resulting .sln file in vs2010 and let it do the conversion.
edit - annoying feature so far is that the vs plugin doesn't support vs2010 which makes it essentially impossible to use for desktop app development.
Traditionally VS support was part of the paid licences, with the OS package you only get mingw support. Things are changing, but might have some rough edges for a while.
OTOH, mingw has a HUGE advantage: deployment. You don't have to chase around the vcredist_x86 files and all the associated voodoo. Just be sure to include all the .DLLs you use and that's it.
Also, there's QtCreator. It's not as featureful or omniscient as VS; but it does feel a lot nicer and easier to use. It takes off all the tedious work of nmake, and embeds the UI editors. And it's cross platform!
honestly, for me VS can drop dead this minute and i won't miss it.
Qt V4.8.0 contains prebuilt binaries for Visual Studio 2010 so you don't need to build manually anymore:
http://qt.nokia.com/downloads/windows-cpp-vs2010
I start using the visual studio c++ express 2008 at home but there is no ATL in it.
How can I add ATL to visual studio c++ express 2008?
ATL 7.1 is now part of the Windows Driver Kit.
ATL was only included in older versions of the SDK. Recent versions of ATL share much code with MFC and are only available with the real versions of Visual Studio, i.e. not with VS Express.
So: to use ATL and/or MFC, you need to buy the Professional version of Visual Studio. If you are content with old versions of ATL, you can download old versions of the platform SDK from the Microsoft website.
http://codegem.org/2008/09/wtl-wizard-for-visual-studio-2008
In his modified script, replace VisualStudio to VCExpress.
You'll need to download the platform SDK and muck around with some dependencies to get ATL.
There might be some more "unsavory" ways to get MFC ;) if you catch my drift. Also many institutions have educational VS licenses which are free.
You just need to install Windows Platform SDK as described here