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.
Related
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.
So I'm trying to set up an Allegro template by linking everything to a new VS program.
I've downloaded the .cc files from Allegro and followed the installation guide in it's Wiki for setting up with Visual Studio 2010.
The version is 5.0.10.
Upon putting the main source code in my first program and linking everything as per the wiki (bin, include, lib), the program builds fine, however, when you go to debug/run the program in VS, a window pops up with:
This program can't run because msvcr110d.dll missing from your computer.
I'm successfully tested other VS projects using other third party libraries and they still work fine.
What could be the problem?
This S/O question doesn't have an answer.
You may download and install the MSVC redistributable: http://www.microsoft.com/es-es/download/details.aspx?id=30679
Anyway, it's not normal that msvcr110d is required instead of msvcr110. That means that the library you are using has been compiled with the debug runtime of the MSVC2012. Check it and choose the right library files.
The tutorial you are following includes this text:
This tutorial may reference an older version number than what is available on that page. While following the instructions, if you copy and paste something with a version number, be sure to update it to reflect the version you downloaded.
That would indeed appear to be the case. The runtime that the program is trying to link to is the runtime for VS2012. So it seems that the files you downloaded are more recent than the tutorial. The .lib files that you are using are linked against VS2012.
Possible solutions:
Repeat the steps in the tutorial, but use VS2012 rather than VS2010.
Find the old version of the tutorial that has VS2010 .lib files.
Build the entire thing from scratch so that you are not dependent on supplied .lib files that are tied to a specific version of VS.
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.
I have been trying to set up OpenCV for the past few days with no results. I am using Windows 7 and VS C++ 2008 express edition. I have downloaded and installed OpenCV 2.1 and some of the examples work. I downloaded CMake and ran it to generate the VS project files and built all of them but there with several errors, and couldn't get any farther than that.
When I ran CMake I configured it to use the VS 9 compiler, and then it brought up a list of items in red such as BUILD_EXAMPLES, BUILD_LATEX_DOCS, ect. All of them were unchecked except BUILD_NEW_PYTHON_SUPPORT, BUILD_TESTS, ENABLE_OPENMP, and OPENCV_BUILD_3RDPARTY_LIBS. I configured and generate without changing anything and then it generated the VS files such as ALL_BUILD.vcproj. I built the OpenCV VS solution in debug mode and it had 15 failures (maybe this is part of the problem or is it because I don't have python and stuff like that?)
Now there was a lib folder created after building but inside there was just this VC++ Minimum Rebuild Dependency file and Program Debug Database file, both called cvhaartraining. I believe it should have created the .lib files I need instead of this. Also, the bin folder now has a folder called Debug with the same types of files with names like cv200d and cvaux200d.
Believe I need those .lib files to move forward.
I would also greatly appreciate if someone could direct me to a reliable tutorial to set up VS for OpenCV because I have been reading a lot of tutorials and they all say different things such as some say to configure Window's environment variables and other say files are located in folders such as OpenCV/cv which I don't have. I have gotten past the point of clear headed thinking so if anyone could offer some direction or a simple list of the files I need to link then I would be thankful.
Also a side question: why when linking the OpenCV libs do you have to put them in quotes?
If you're just getting started, you should probably grab the prebuilt libraries for OpenCV instead. It's OpenCV-2.1.0-win32-vs2008.exe from this page.
Once you have that, there is really no setup. Just link to the (already built) lib files in any VS project you create, and make sure the OpenCV include directory is in the projects include path.