[QGIS-Developer] How to setup Visual Studio 2019 environment for QGIS C++ development?

[james at shaeffer.co]

Tomjan,

Here is a tutorial I put together on my blog to compile QGIS from source on Windows, https://www.shaeffer.co/compiling-qgis-on-windows/. It is current and will generate a .sln file to open in Visual Studio 2015.

The work that Jürgen is putting in (https://github.com/qgis/QGIS/pull/38102/) will move us "Windows folks" to VS 2019. There is a lot more to the project than just a simple .sln file (this coming from my personal endeavors into compiling QGIS on Windows).

--
James

-----Original Message-----
From: QGIS-Developer <qgis-developer-bounces at lists.osgeo.org> On Behalf Of tomjan at gmx.com
Sent: Tuesday, August 4, 2020 2:43 PM
To: qgis-developer at lists.osgeo.org
Subject: Re: [QGIS-Developer] How to setup Visual Studio 2019 environment for QGIS C++ development?

Hi Ismail and thank you for your link to the pull request.
Currently that PR has not been accepted, because of some checks not being successful.

I do not really know exactly what that pull request is trying to do (but as many as 42 files seem to be involved in the PR) but as far as I can see it does not include a ".sln" file (Visual Studio solution file) nor any ".vcxproj" files (Visual C++ project files) nor a file "packages.config" (for NuGet managed libraries).

I think I read somewhere here in the QGIS developer list archive that someone estimated that 90% percent of the QGIS developers are using Linux.
If that is true then I believe the reason might be that Windows developers (which are used to NuGet and Visual Studio solutions files and project files) may choose to give up when they feel it seems difficult to even get started with the development environment for QGIS with Windows.

Can anyone answer this question:
Would it, for some reason, be impossible to provide a Visual Studio solution file (and .vcxproj files) that can simply be opened, and then the required dependencies would be retrieved automatically with NuGet (according to NuGet references in the ".vcxproj" files or "packages.config") ?
One obvious reason could be that there may be some required libraries which are not available through NuGet but those kind of files therefore really will need a manual installation.
But I mean is it possible to provide easy instructions with only very FEW manual installations for Windows, and then the majority of the dependencies would be retrieved through NuGet when you open a Visual Studio solution file which hopefully would be available from the github repository?

The only kind of libraries I myself have used with NuGet is .NET libraries but as far as I understand, NuGet can also be used for native C++ libraries:
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/nuget/native-support/

I believe that the QGIS project would get more contributors if you can provide a development environment that are EASY to GET STARTED WITH for potential newcomers using Windows Visual Studio.
 
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Sent: Tuesday, August 04, 2020 at 12:22 AM
From: "Ismail Sunni" <imajimatika at gmail.com>
To: tomjan at gmx.com
Cc: "QGIS Developer List" <qgis-developer at lists.osgeo.org>
Subject: Re: [QGIS-Developer] How to setup Visual Studio 2019 environment for QGIS C++ development?

Hi Tomjan,
 
Perhaps you want to see this PR https://github.com/qgis/QGIS/pull/38102 for your question.
 Best regards
 

On Mon, Aug 3, 2020, 23:44 <tomjan at gmx.com[mailto:tomjan at gmx.com]> wrote:

I would be interested in learning to contribute to QGIS.
My previous C++ experience is that about 20 years ago I did some (for a couple of years) Visual C++ programming with Microsoft's MFC as the GUI.
Now I think I could refresh my C++ skills and also learn QT which I have never programmed with so far.
 
However, I am not a Linux user, but always have been using Windows (currently Windows 10).
It seems to be a complicated obstacle to get started running QGIS through Visual Studio 2019.
 
I think it would be great with a tutorial (webpage or youtube video tutorial) about how to get started with an example showing how to do all necessary installations/configurations/setup until you can compile and run QGIS with a breakpoint in Visual Studio 2019.
 
I have seen that the "INSTALL" file in the repository refers to Visual Studio 2015, but it seems awkward if it really would be necessary to use such an ancient version?
Is nobody of the QGIS developers using Visual Studio 2019?
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