I've been experimenting, in a very limited way, over build techniques using Visual Studio 2013 Desktop Express and MSYS2 (an alternative to CygWin). I am barely stumbling along although I have manage to build other projects that build with either MSYS2 or CygWin and produce native code. I've not tried the AOO build just yet. My reason for doing this is to see what are the prospects for using the VC++ 2013 compiler to build 64-bit software and also see how to build any chunks of AOO for 64-bit Windows.
Yesterday, there was a very useful announcement at a conference that was all about Visual Studio 2015 and some big moves that are being made to work in open-source settings. Along with that announcement, the Visual Studio 2013 Community Edition was announced. The Community Edition is free and available now. It provides everything that the three 2013 Express editions (Desktop, Windows [Universal], and Web) provide. (And they can still use side-by-side but I see no reason to do that.) What may be of interest to developers here is that the Community Edition also includes MFC and ATL. It allows mixed projects, allows Python Tools, Visual Studio extensions, already includes F#, and has many more templates. With the libraries and the VC++ compiler, there is cross-compiling to x86, x64, and ARM. There can now be complex solutions/builds, and the compiler is perfectly usable in makefile projects. There is Git integration and the ability to work between VS on the desktop and clones from GitHub (clones) and elsewhere, including the free Visual Studio Online service that can be used with VS 2013, etc. This is just a heads-up. I installed the Community Edition last night and I have also downloaded the .iso. The ISO is almost 7GB, so if you get that you might have to be content to mount it as a virtual drive long enough to do the install. The web install takes a while but is not so demanding. I will be fiddling around more with this for some forensic work I am interested in. I hope to chew on the AOO code enough to find out if this is workable in (1) building with GCC and related tools using MSYS2 and then (2) substituting the VC++ compiler and libraries. Nothing is going to happen quickly. I am dabbling. Anyone who wants to look into the Visual Studio 2013 Community edition can find it on the page <http://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/downloads/> under Visual Studio Community & Express. Check the System Requirements too. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscr...@openoffice.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: dev-h...@openoffice.apache.org
