We have decided to experiment with providing binaries for wxWidgets releases.
So, for the first time ever, 2.9.4 release includes
binaries
for a few different versions of Microsoft Visual C++ compiler.
However we might not have done a very good job of explaining how to actually
use them, the
README at the link above is relatively brief and omits
some steps, so let me try to explain in more details how to build your
wxWidgets applications using the files provided and without building wxWidgets
yourself.
First, you need to get the correct files. You will always need the
headers
one but the rest depends on your compiler version and architecture: as
different versions of MSVC compiler are not binary compatible, you should
select the files with the correct
vc80,
vc90 or
vc100 suffix depending on whether you use Visual Studio 2005, 2008 or
2010 respectively. You also need to decide whether you use the
x64
files for 64-bit development or the ones without this suffix for the still
more common 32-bit builds. After determining the combination of suffixes you
need, you should download the "Dev" and the "ReleaseDLL" files in addition to
the "Headers" one above, e.g. for 32-bit MSVS 2010 development you need
wxMSW-2.9.4_vc100_Dev.7z
and
wxMSW-2.9.4_vc100_ReleaseDLL.7z.
Once you have the files you need, unzip all of them into the same directory,
for example
c:\wx\2.9.4. You should have only
include and
lib subdirectories under it, nothing else. To avoid hard-coding this
path into your projects, define
wxwin environment variable containing
it: although it's a little known fact, all versions of MSVC support
environment variable expansion in the C++ projects (but not, unfortunately, in
the solution files).
Next step is to set up your project to use these files. You need to do the
following:
-
In the compiler options, i.e. "C/C++" properties:
-
Add $(wxwin)/include/msvc;$(wxwin)/include to the "Additional
Include Directories". Notice that the order is important here, putting
the MSVC-specific directory first ensures that you use
wx/setup.h automatically linking in wxWidgets libraries.
-
Add WXUSINGDLL and wxMSVC_VERSION_AUTO to the list
of defined symbols in "Preprocessor Definitions". The first should be
self-explanatory (we only provide DLLs, not static libraries) while
the second one is necessary to use the libraries from e.g.
lib\vc100_dll directory and not the default
lib\vc_dll.
-
Also check that _UNICODE and UNICODE symbols are defined
in the same "Preprocessor Definitions" section. This should already be the
case for the newly created projects but it might be necessary to add them if
you're upgrading an existing one.
[added at 2013-02-08 in response to comments]
-
Check that you use "Multi-threaded [Debug] DLL" in the "Run-time
library" option under "Code Generation" to ensure that your build uses
the same CRT version as our binaries.
-
In the linker options you only need to add $(wxwin)\lib\vc100_dll
(with the compiler-version-dependent suffix, of course) to "Additional Library Directories" under "Linker\General" in the options. Thanks to the use of MSVC-specific
setup.h you don't need to list wxWidgets libraries manually, i.e. you do not need to put anything in the list of
"Additional Dependencies".
Now you should be able to build your project successfully, both in "Debug" and
"Release" configurations. With MSVC 10 it can also be done from the command
line using
msbuild.exe. Of course, to run the generated executable
you will need to either add the directory containing wxWidgets DLLs to your
PATH or copy the DLL files to a directory already on it. Finally, if
you want to distribute the binaries created using these options, you will need
to install Microsoft Visual C++ run-time DLLs. Again, MSVC 10 has an advantage
here as you can simply copy
msvcp100.dll and
msvcr100.dll as
any other DLL, while you need to install specially for the previous compiler
versions that use WinSxS ("side-by-side") for them.
Let us know if you run into any problems using these binaries or, on the
contrary, if you didn't but were glad to have them. If enough people find them
useful, we'll try to provide them again for 2.9.5 and, most importantly, for
3.0.
Updated on 2012-08-23T12:55:10: Corrected linker options instructions.
