Building on Windows

August 13, 2025 ยท View on GitHub

Prerequisites:

  • Visual Studio 2022 or Visual Studio 2019 (ensure C++ CMake tools for Windows is included)
  • Python 3.x (the version that comes with Visual Studio 2019 is fine)

Optional, but recommended:

  • Microsoft Child Process Debugging Power Tool: VS2019; VS2022

Initial setup, for use after cloning or updating the repo:

  1. Open command prompt in working copy folder

  2. Run make init_vs2022 to generate a solution for Visual Studio 2022, or make init_vs2019 to generate a solution for Visual Studio 2019

    You should get a bunch of output - there may be the odd warning, but there should be no obvious errors, and it should finish with an exit code of 0

General day-to-day build steps:

  1. Load solution into Visual Studio:

    • build\vs2019\b2.sln if using VS2019
    • build\vs2022\b2.sln if using VS2022

  2. Build

  3. Run

(The day-to-day build steps may also work after updating the repo; cmake is supposed to sort itself out. But it does cache some information and the initial build steps ensure everything is rebuilt.)

Notes

  • Because of the way cmake works, there are 50+ projects in the solution. Even though most are rarely used, they're still there cluttering the place up. You just have to put up with this

  • support for Visual Studio 2019 will probably go away eventually...

Running the automated tests

To run from the command line, run the following (depending on Visual Studio version), replacing <<config>> with the config of interest: Debug, RelWithDebInfo, or Final.

  • make run_tests_vs2019 CONFIG=<<config>> if using VS2019
  • make run_tests_vs2022 CONFIG=<<config>> if using VS2022

This will run the tests in parallel according to PC core count.

To run in the debugger, set the Visual Studio startup project to be visual_studio_test_runner, build, and run. This runs the full set of tests, such as it is, one test at a time.

You can exclude the particularly slow tests with the visual_studio_test_runner_subset project, which will finish a bit more quickly.

If you have the child process debugging tool installed, the debugger will attach to each test case as it is executed. This does add overhead but makes debugging a lot easier.

Individual tests can be run by setting each one as the startup project.