In previous post my colleague showed how to create RPM packages with CMake. As a really versatile tool it is also able to create and build Visual Studio projects on Windows. This property makes it very valuable when you want to integrate your project into a CI cycle(in our case Jenkins).
Prerequisites:
To be able to compile anything following packages needed to be installed beforehand:
- CMake. It is helpful to put it in the PATH environment variable so that absolute paths aren’t needed.
- Microsoft Windows SDK for Windows 7 and .NET Framework 4 (the web installer or the ISOs). The part “.NET Framework 4” is very important, since when the SDK for the .NET Framework 3.5 is installed you will get following parse error for your *.vcxproject files:
error MSB4066: The attribute “Label” in element is unrecognized
at the following position:
<ItemGroup Label=”ProjectConfigurations”>
Probably equally important is the bitness of the installed SDK. The x64 ISO differs only in one letter from the x86 one. Look for the X if want 64 bit.
- .NET Framework 4, necessary to make msbuild run
It is possible that you encounter following message during your SDK setup:
A problem occurred while installing selected Windows SDK components. Installation of the “Microsoft Windows SDK for Windows 7” product has reported the following error: Please refer to Samples\Setup\HTML\ConfigDetails.htm document for further information. Please attempt to resolve the problem and then start Windows SDK setup again. If you continue to have problems with this issue, please visit the SDK team support page at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=130245. Click the View Log button to review the installation log. To exit, click Finish.
The reason behind this wordy and less informative error message were the Visual C++ Redistributables installed on the system. As suggested by Microsoft KB article removing them all helped.
Makefiles:
For CMake to build anything you need to have a CMakeLists.txt file in your project. For a tutorial on how to use CMake, look at this page. Here is a simple CMakeLists.txt to get you started:
project(MyProject)
cmake_minimum_required(VERSION 2.6)
set(source_files
main.cpp
)
include_directories(
${CMAKE_CURRENT_SOURCE_DIR}
)
add_executable(MyProject ${source_files})
Building:
To build a project there are few steps necessary. You can enter them in your CI directy or put them in a batch file.
call "%ProgramFiles%\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v7.1\Bin\SetEnv.cmd" /Release /x86
With this call all necessary environment variables are set. Be careful on 64 bit platforms as jenkins slave executes this call in a 32 bit context and so “%ProgramFiles%” is resolved to “ProgramFiles (x86)” where the SDK does not lie.
del CMakeCache.txt
This command is not strictly necessary, but it prevents you from working with outdated generated files when you change your configuration.
cmake -G "Visual Studio 10" .
Generates a Visual Studio 2010 Solution. Every change to the solution and the project files will be gone when you call it, so make sure you track all necessary files in the CMakeLists.txt.
cmake --build . --target ALL_BUILD --config Release
The final step. It will net you the MyProject.exe binary. The target parameter is equal to the name of the project in the solution and the config parameter is one of the solution configurations.
Final words:
The hardest and most time consuming part was the setup of prerequisites. Generic, not informative error messages are the worst you can do to a clueless customer. But… when you are done with it, you are only two small steps apart from an automatically built executable.
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