Compile 2013 VS Community Ov4.2-4.8.8 Workflow

Go to this microsoft web page Older Visual Studio and scroll down to 2013.

If you use Windows XP or Vista, upgrade to Windows 7 or newer or try to use Visual Studio 2010 instead (you will need to build your own set of dependencies).

Install Visual Studio - you can disable all the optional features offered to save some space.

Install and let it register in the PATH environment variable

The defaults for all the installation settings are fine except the following:

On the Adjusting your PATH environment, select

Run Git from the Windows Command Prompt*.

On the Choosing CR/LF behavior select Checkout as-is, Commit Unix LF.

This is really important, the codebase uses Unix LF line endings and committing CR/LF makes the commits huge and hides their real content.

If your git is already installed, please edit the .git/config file in your local working copy of the OpenCPN source tree and set autocrlf = input in the [core] section on top.

References below to Source Directory are for where your local git repository is located + the project being worked on. Examples:

Install

On 32bit Windows, add C:\Program Files\Poedit\GettextTools\bin to PATH environment variable. On a 64bit system, the path will be C:\Program Files (x86)\Poedit\GettextTools\bin

On Windows 7 and later, open Computer, click System Properties, and in the left column click Advanced System Settings.

On the Advanced tab, click on Environment Variables button and add the path in which msgfmt.exe resides to the PATH system variable.

On Windows XP, right-click My Computer, select Properties…

Get the latest 3.0 release from http://wxwidgets.org/downloads/ (at the time of this writing 3.0.2)

Uncompress to your drive (we will assume to C:\wxWidgets-3.0.2 in this text)

Note that git clone of opencpn contains 16 wxWidget files under "source\buildwin\wxWidgets, which are used for making installer packages.(NOT for compiling OpenCPN)

In Visual Studio, open wx_vc12.sln

Select all projects from the Project Explorer ,

Right-click, select Properties ,

Select All Configurations from the Configuration: dropdown on top

and in Configuration Properties → General set the Platform Toolset to Visual Studio 2013 - Windows XP (v120_xp)

Build both the Debug and Release DLL targets, DO NOT build the static libraries

In case you are using Visual Studio 2010, use the wx_vc10.sln solution and don’t change the platform toolset

In order for Cmake to find wxWidgets, you must add your wxWidgets root directory C:$[WXDIR] (for example in place of WXDIR use 'C:\wxWidgets-3.0.2') to your PATH environment variable.

To be able to run debug builds and release builds// without install// add C:$[WXDIR]\lib\vc_dll to your PATH.

After doing this, you have to restart the running programs (cmd.exe, cmake-gui, VisualStudio etc) to make sure they "see" the changed environment variables.

If you are unsure, restart Windows and everything will be set. If you don’t do this you will have problems running your debug builds later.

If you have problems with cmake not finding your wxWidgets installation, try also creating another environment variable called WXWIN with a value of C:$[WXDIR] (for example use 'C:\wxWidgets-3.0.2').

Also, try creating an environment variable called wxWidgets_LIB_DIR=C:$[WXDIR]\lib\vc_dll and wxWidgets_ROOT_DIR=C:$[WXDIR].

Again, don’t forget to restart the running programs involved in the build.

Note the Setup Batch File "Git_opencpn.bat" will download and expand OpenCPN_buildwin.7z into source\buildwin.

The dependencies top directory is buildwin and hence the files and dirs will be placed under that directory.

In case you are using Visual Studio 2010, you must build your own dependencies) and extract the archive into your toplevel OpenCPN source directory created by the clone operation above. The archive contains some binary files needed to link OpenCPN and produce the installer.

In case you need the PDB files for the prebuilt libraries (unlikely, really, if you don’t know what for, you don’t), get them from here.

When extracting the libraries into the build tree, don’t overwrite existing files. This will cause problems with pull requests. The buildwin directory after extraction should look like this:

Use of the VS Command Prompt and CMake commands is recommended, rather than using the CMake-GUI interface.

Change Directory [CD] into the "build" directory

Then issue the cmake command which uses the large CMakeLists.txt located in the Source Directory (C:\\Users[username]\Documents\GitHub\Ocpn) to determine to Operating System and then to set up the build directory for compilation and building commands to follow.

NOTE: This is a good point to Start over again .

If you mess up copying the necessary files or are having troubles compiling & building.

The first reasonable intermediate step is to remove all the files in the build directory and then start over by using cmake -T v120_xp .. from the ..\build directory. That often will solve a configuration problem.

Also you could just "git clone" another differently named OpenCPN repository and configure that again.

Click on the Configure button.

If you are asked to choose the generator, select "Visual Studio 12" (Or better say, select the version of VS you want to use for your build).

The information which appeared is red and the Generate button stays disabled? Just hit Configure again…

Click on the Generate button.

Solution and project files should be created in your build directory.

IMPORTANT suggestion: Use CMAKE GUI tool to configure OpenCPN to verify that wxWidgets_LIB_DIR points to the {root}/lib/vc_dll directory. This check is necessary since the cmake FindWxWidgets module sometimes finds the wrong source and/or build config.

If you are using CMake version 3.0 or later you will get warnings about Policy CMP0043. These can be ignored.

Run Developer Command Prompt for VS2013 from Start menu → Programs → Microsoft Visual Studio → Visual Studio Tools.

Change Directory [cd] into the build directory. Issue the command for a "release" build

The debug version is similar to compiling for release, but adds a number of files which track processes for the purpose of debugging.

The first run will have ~50 warnings. It should also end with 0 Error(s) after several re-runs of the command.

Note that if you don’t use the –-config parameter, a debug build is performed.

Wait for the builds to complete.

At this point the build\debug directory has 9 lib files, opencpn.pdb, opencpn.ilk and opencpn.exe and no subdirectories.

The build\release directory does not contain opencpn.ilk or opencpn.pdb

Neither the release or debug will run properly at this point, because the necessary files and important dlls are not available in several directories.

Below we will show you several ways to copy the correct files to these directories.

In Visual Studio, open the solution created by the CMake command earlier (Use the file ../build/OpenCPN.sln). Compile the whole solution or individual projects.

You must compile project opencpn before you can compile any plugins (to be fixed in the configuration process)

If you want to debug, don’t forget to select opencpn as a start-up roject.

Once this is done, in the Solution Explorer (right panel) the project opencpn will be bold.

If you didn’t add the WX DLL path to the PATH environment variable earlier, copy the needed WX DLLs to the build directory (Debug or Release, depending on which version you build).

The DLLs can be found in C:${WXDIR}\lib\vc_dll and you will need:

Debug Build requires that certain files be copied to certain directories.

Running OpenCpn in portable mode from the source\build\release directory (bypassing the installation process) requires that certain files be copied to the source\build\release directory. Note: If you are using NSIS Package Installation and do not plan on running Opencpn from source\build\release, copying the files to source\build\release is not necessary.

6.1 Setup Batch Files just below(which may be the quickest and easiest method).

Step by Step Manual copy of files

git_opencpn.bat.doc NOTE: only used for a clean installation from \github

config.bat.doc del cmakeCache.txt, Copy files.

dbbuild.bat.doc Run cmake –build . –config debug & call dbcopy.bat

dbcopy.bat.doc Copy necessary dll files.

build.bat.doc Run cmake –build . –config release –target package

clean.bat.doc Run MS VStudio "clean"

Refer to Download the Setup Batch Files below for more step by step details.

For Debug Build use MS VStudio and open source\build\opencpn.sln

For Release Build execute portable opencpn /p from source\build\release

For Release run an NSIS Installation Package "cpack" and install the exe.