MSVS Versions Poll Results

Two months ago, I've asked about the oldest version of MSVS you were still using. Without further ado, here are the results of the poll:

I admit to have been (pleasantly) surprised by the number of VC12 users. Of course, this poll, as all web polls, is certainly biased because of the absolutely non-random participants selection, but I still want to believe these results and so we'll probably drop (until enough people object very loudly) VC7 support too soon. VC8 is not much more popular, but there are quite few differences between it and VC9 and we'll still keep supporting the latter one for quite some time, so VC8 can piggyback on its support anyhow.

Thanks to everybody who voted!

New MSVS project files

If you try to build the latest wxWidgets sources from Subversion or Git, you may be surprised to discover that the various wx_vcN_*.vcxproj project files don't exist any more. The solution files wx_vcN.sln do still exist (for N from 7 to 12), so if you just use them to build wxWidgets, almost nothing changes for you, but if you use the projects themselves, you will need to use the new ones, without vcN_ part in their name.

Indeed, we now have only one set of projects for VC10, VC11 and VC12 (MSVS 2010, 2012 and 2013 respectively), which is very nice from maintenance point of view and will ensure that all modern, i.e. MSBuild-based, VC projects are always synchronized in the future. It also means that it is a bit easier to customize the projects if you use more than one version of VC at the same time: just copy wx_setup.props file to wx_local.props (this is recommended instead of modifying the former directly as it's under version control and so would appear modified if you do this) and edit this property file. For example, in mine I have

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<Project ToolsVersion="4.0" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/developer/msbuild/2003">
  <PropertyGroup Label="UserMacros">
    <wxShortVersionString>31</wxShortVersionString>
    <wxToolkitPrefix>msw</wxToolkitPrefix>
    <wxCompilerPrefix Condition="'$(VisualStudioVersion)' == '10.0'">vc100</wxCompilerPrefix>
    <wxCompilerPrefix Condition="'$(VisualStudioVersion)' == '11.0'">vc110</wxCompilerPrefix>
    <wxCompilerPrefix Condition="'$(VisualStudioVersion)' == '12.0'">vc120</wxCompilerPrefix>
    <wxCfg>
    </wxCfg>
    <wxVendor>custom</wxVendor>
  </PropertyGroup>
  ... the rest of wx_setup.props unmodified ...
</Project>

to ensure that different output directories are used for all versions of the compiler. Of course, the other properties can be modified here as well, e.g. you could set vendor to the name of your company if you're distributing custom builds of wxWidgets DLLs.

Other than that, the new projects should work just as well as the old ones, but please let us know if you find any problems with them. Happy building!