TPP:Building Windows-native binaries with Visual Studio 2005

From SPCTools

Contents 1 Original author 2 Introduction 3 Why Visual Studio 2005 Professional? 4 How about a free version? 5 Getting the source code 6 Start Visual Studio 2005 Professional 7 From MSVC, open the TPP.sln solution 8 Make sure that you've chosen the correct build configuration: debug or release 9 Build the whole TPP: "build solution" 10 Or, just build the converters 11 Where are the MSVC results built? 12 How about the Trapper installer project? 13 Good luck!

Original author

Natalie Tasman, May 2009 TPP 4.2.1

Introduction

This guide is for software developers who might wish to build the TPP on their own system for building and testing modification to the code. TPP users do not have to build the system on their computer, and can simply use the pre-build Windows TPP installer.

This is a very rough guide, and the addition of any more detail and/or screenshots would be welcome.

I abbreviate the Microsoft tools as MSVC.

Why Visual Studio 2005 Professional?

1. The TPP developer community is very small, and this is the software that we developed the TPP with. We simply don't have the resources to maintain various Visual Studio build systems.
2. The raw-to-XML converters make extensive use of COM calls, which were not well supported in previous free versions of MSVC (see next point below.)
3. The converters can only be build with Visual Studio. We weren't able to get this working with Mingw due to the extensive use of COM operations and other Windows SDK-related calls.

How about a free version?

Work is underway to get the TPP working with the (currently) free Visual Studio 2008 Express. This will take some time, but when it is ready, all of the developers have agreed to move to this build tool.

Getting the source code

Please see TPP:Getting the sourcecode for a windows build

Start Visual Studio 2005 Professional

From MSVC, open the TPP.sln solution

In <tpp>/src/TPP.sln.

Make sure that you've chosen the correct build configuration: debug or release

You really want to use this top level solution file for everything, as we've added common settings and inter-project dependencies.

Build the whole TPP: "build solution"

You may need to refer to TPP's readme and deal with things like boost uncompression in win_lib, but this should be really taken care of for you.

Or, just build the converters

right-click on any of the converter projects and build them. Note, if they are properly set up, a large chain of dependencies will need to be built.

Where are the MSVC results built?

<TPP/src/<configuration> -- either "release" or "debug"

How about the Trapper installer project?

You'll need to manually add this project to the TPP solution if you want to build it. It's not included by default (and don't check it in) because this step requires the MHDAC files from Agilent, which we can only redistribute with the "click-through" license verification within the Trapper.

Good luck!

Please feel free to post on the spctools-dev list, and Brian, Brendan, Chee-Hong, or myself (Natalie) can try to help.