Re: [Openexr-devel] Getting the win32 project to work with visual studio .net

[Moritz Moeller]

I just wanted to share a little thing regarding Visual Studio-dependent 
Windows builds in general here. I'm part of the developers that work on 
the open-source Maya->RenderMan bridge called 'Liquid'. Liquid is a 
software that comes from the IRIX/Linux platform originally.

I just recently added a makefile for Windows as I had repeatedly trouble 
with Visual Studio forgetting certain changes made to the project all of 
a sudden (every two months or so this happened). This would result in 
the build failing of course and then require the annoying re-adding of 
the 'forgotten' stuff (changed options, CPP defines and new dependencies).

This new Windows-specific makefile is based on and /very/ similar to the 
Linux/Unix one and is also used with *GNU make* (as part of Cygwin -- we 
btw. do /not/ use automake on this project). It invokes the MS C++ 
command-line compiler & linker.
As newer VS versions don't allow to export the project as a makefile 
anymore, the required compiler and linker options are best found by 
looking into two files that VS writes out when building (don't remember 
what their names & extensions were, but they stood out among the .obj 
files clearly). It took me less than half a day to get everything 
working absolutely smoothly with that approach.

On a side note, the MS C++ compiler & linker are available for free from 
MS, as part of the Microsoft Visual Toolkit 2003 package. As VS is no 
longer needed now, we thereby removed any dependency the project had on 
commercial tools on Windows too.
Suffice to say I never had any trouble building Liquid on Windows since 
then. :)


Cheers,

Moritz