Building tests with MSVC 6 broken?

[Francois Gouget]

On Tue, 5 Feb 2008, Dan Kegel wrote:

> Building tests with MSVC 6 broken?

Yes.
MSVC 6 really starts to show its age.

It has trouble with some math stuff (rather large constants) used in one 
of the tests. That can be worked around by applying a service pack. See:
   http://www.winehq.org/site/docs/winedev-guide/testing-windows

But the show stopper is that it is incompatible with the latest SDKs.
 * First there's the LSTATUS stuff. The PSDK assumes it's defined in a 
   header that's provided by Visual C++ (basetyps.h), but VC6 does not 
   have it. Same for sal.h.
 * Then there's the format of some of the PSDK libraries which MSVC 6 
   does not understand. That's the error you got with uuid.lib but it 
   happens with others too (all static libraries I believe).


The solution is to use Visual Studio 2005 which is a free download.
There's still some hitches there:
 * it does not use .dsp files anymore but can convert them to the new 
   XML build files.
 * in the process it loses some dll imports so you'll have to add them 
   back manually, for each test. So it's feasible to compile individual 
   tests but compiling all of them is a real pain.
 * you'd better add _CRT_NONSTDC_NO_DEPRECATE and _CRT_SECURE_NO_DEPRECATE
   otherwise you'll get a ton of warnings.

What this means is that msvcmaker needs to be updated to generate the 
new XML build files directly, all with the right settings.


-- 
Francois Gouget <fgouget at free.fr>              http://fgouget.free.fr/
     You can have my guns when you pry them from my kids cold, dead hands.