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.
Related
I am having trouble building the XLNT (https://github.com/tfussell/xlnt) library in Visual Studio 2017, and I'm confused. I downloaded the latest version of the library and the latest version of CMake. When I ran the CMake gui, it couldn't find the libstudxml files. A post said that those needed to be downloaded; so I downloaded that library (https://www.codesynthesis.com/projects/libstudxml/#download) and placed it in third-party/libstudxml.
Then I got errors that it couldn't find some .hxx files in libstudxml. I found this article, https://discourse.cmake.org/t/cmake3-20-cant-generate-xint-package/2987, that said I needed to replace libstudxml in some paths in the libstudxml.build\CMakeLists.txt file with just xml. Then it still couldn't find these three .hxx files (content.hxx, exception.hxx, and forward.hxx). I looked in the libstudxml/xml folder (they were all there but extensionless). I changed the CMakeLists.txt file to not have the .hxx extension and Cmake was able to generate.
When I went to compile it in Visual Studio (hitting Project in the Cmake GUI), I got errors that some files couldn't find the content.hxx file again and the builds failed. I'm kind of running in circles. To get cmake to generate, I had to remove the .hxx extensions, but then some files complain because they are looking for them. I tried leaving the three files witout the extensions and removing the extensions from the CMakeLists.txt file, but then some of the files were looking for the files without the extension. Leaving the files both with and without the extension was also a cluster. I understand that C++ can handle extensionless header files, but the CMake file seems to want extension, but I don't think VS is happy with them.
Additionally, while I needed to change the folder name to be xml instead of libstudxml for CMake, various include files in the source code are still looking for libstudxml; so that doesn't work.
Any thoughts?
Thanks--
Al
I experienced the same problems with the same progress and blockages. Indeed changing the extensions or locations did not solve the problem. Then I tried to find another version of the libstudxml library, the creator of xlnt might have used an other one.
So I found the following archive: https://pkg.cppget.org/1/beta/libstudxml/
and placed the files in \xlnt-master\third-party\libstudxml , without modifying the names of the CMake path. This time I was able to compile the library (mingw32-make, I'm not using VS17 in my case).
I downloaded the xlnt library for working with Excel - https://github.com/tfussell/xlnt. Can you please tell me what to do with it further? Honestly, I still can’t understand how among all the files there are in the downloaded archive, and there are 100 of them .hpp and .cpp files, what should I do with them?
1)As far as I understand, they need to be processed by the Cmake program and it seems that the output should appear .lib file, but I absolutely can’t understand how to do it or maybe something else
2)Or how can they be directly processed by Visual Studio 2017?
PS:When I launch Smack, I select the Source folder, the Cmake generates many incomprehensible files, but among them there is not one file with the .lib extension.
Help me please.
With CMake you can obtain the visual studio 2017 project files
and then compile the xlnt library.
Unzip the archive file
Within the xlnt folder, create a new directory and call it build
Launche CMake (GUI)
Browse for the source code folder
Browse for the build folder xlnt/build
With the Configure button select the tool (IDE/compiler) that you want to use
Pressing the Generate button, CMake will generate (inside the build folder)
the visual studio 2017 project files you need to compile the xlnt library
Building the solution, VS 2017 produces the xlnt.lib, xlnt.exp and xlnt.dll files.
The source path you see in the CMake screenshot is incorrect. You must specify the path that contains the "top level" CMakeLists.txt file.
The correct directory is: C:/Users/Zver/source/repos/XLNT Library/xlnt-master.
The CMakeLists.txt file in the above directory tells CMake all necessary subdirectories.
At this point you will see the static compilation option of the library appear.
If you use the MinGW/GCC compiler you must prevent the path from containing empty spaces.
Then you need to rename the directory from "XLNT Library" to "XLNTLibrary". At this point the path would become:
C:/Users/Zver/source/repos/XLNTLibrary/xlnt-master.
I am using OF in my project and I want to use some add-ons but I have to add .cpp files to my project in order to compile them. I don't like it. Is there any option so I could specify a folder to scan for source files and compile every .cpp file it finds?
I thought it might be Source Directories in VC++ Directories section but it didn't work. Then I don't really get what it does.
If you want to compile sources using Visual Studio, you will have to add them to your project.
There is nothing wrong about adding external sources to your project in a nice filter.
You can also create a makefile to be used by Visual Studio which will list sources you need.
I'm not aware of an option that does what you ask for in VS. The Source directories configuration is used for locating source files that go along with libraries that you are using in your project. This way you can use the library in its binary format without the need to recompile it every time you rebuild your project, but you can also step into its code while debugging.
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.