Building-on-Windows.md

Building on Windows

Prerequisites:

• Visual Studio 2019 (ensure C++ CMake tools for Windows is included)
• Python 3.x (the version that comes with Visual Studio 2019 is fine)

Optional, but recommended:

• Microsoft Child Process Debugging Power Tool

Initial setup, for use after cloning or updating the repo:

1. Open command prompt in working copy folder

2. Run make init_vs2019 to generate a solution for Visual Studio 2019.

   You should get a bunch of output - there may be the odd warning, but there should be no obvious errors, and it should finish with an exit code of 0

General day-to-day build steps:

1. Load solution into Visual Studio: build\vs2019\b2.sln

2. Build

3. Run

(The day-to-day build steps may also work after updating the repo; cmake is supposed to sort itself out. But it does cache some information and the initial build steps ensure everything is rebuilt.)

Notes

• Because of the way cmake works, there are 40+ projects in the solution. Even though most are never used, they're still there cluttering the place up. You just have to put up with this

Running the automated tests

Set the startup project to be visual_studio_test_runner, build, and run. This runs the full set of tests, such as it is, and takes about 4 minutes on my laptop.

You can exclude the slow tests with the visual_studio_test_runner_subset project, which finishes in about 5 seconds.

If you have the child process debugging tool installed, the debugger will attach to each test case as it is executed. This does add overhead but makes debugging a lot easier.

Each test case has its own project in the solution, so you can also run them independently.