Microsoft Visual Studio

[eersoy93]

Hi friends! I'm asking to developers:

Why you work to compile ReactOS via Visual Studio? According to me, it is unnecessary. GCC is enough for compiling ReactOS.

Thanks for answers.

[Z98]

According to the people writing the code, Visual Studio and Microsoft's toolchains have a lot of nice tools to help with development.

[jonaspm]

I think it's not about just compiling, but also about comfort while browsing and debugging

[EmuandCo]

The MSVC Debugger is wonderful. When it worked the first time it already revealed a bunch of bugs, like overwriting parts of memory addresses and stuff which MUST NOT happen. GCC is good for Linux build, but in the future MSVC will be the best option for ROS.

[BlackRabbit]

I have made no secret of my preference for Visual Studio over other types of development environments. As I have mentioned before, if one considers each individual benefit of Visual Studio, and asks if it is better than the alternative, in many cases, the answer might be "no" or "not much better". But when you take the combination of all the features, together, at once, the convenience is without equal, in my opinion.

For example, I am currently working on creating a Visual Studio environment that will allow compilation of (most of) ReactOS to ARM, and in particular, for the Raspberry Pi. In addition to Raspberry Pi, there are many other ARM devices, and being able to generate, quickly, images for these other devices...I can already see how one might do this with Visual Studio. Certainly it is possible to generate images using other methods, but with Visual Studio, it seems so much easier.

[mrugiero]

I have made no secret of my preference for Visual Studio over other types of development environments. As I have mentioned before, if one considers each individual benefit of Visual Studio, and asks if it is better than the alternative, in many cases, the answer might be "no" or "not much better". But when you take the combination of all the features, together, at once, the convenience is without equal, in my opinion.

One of the main strong points of most MS products is their ability to integrate seemingly different things on a nice and productive environment.

For example, I am currently working on creating a Visual Studio environment that will allow compilation of (most of) ReactOS to ARM, and in particular, for the Raspberry Pi. In addition to Raspberry Pi, there are many other ARM devices, and being able to generate, quickly, images for these other devices...I can already see how one might do this with Visual Studio. Certainly it is possible to generate images using other methods, but with Visual Studio, it seems so much easier.

Doesn't CMake help a lot for that? It shouldn't be hard to set it to target ARM with either GCC or MSVC, what else have to be done to set the build environment (I'm not talking of fixing what is needed, for which VS help is quite obvious, but setting it to build for ARM only).

[Z98]

For example, I am currently working on creating a Visual Studio environment that will allow compilation of (most of) ReactOS to ARM, and in particular, for the Raspberry Pi. In addition to Raspberry Pi, there are many other ARM devices, and being able to generate, quickly, images for these other devices...I can already see how one might do this with Visual Studio. Certainly it is possible to generate images using other methods, but with Visual Studio, it seems so much easier.

Doesn't CMake help a lot for that? It shouldn't be hard to set it to target ARM with either GCC or MSVC, what else have to be done to set the build environment (I'm not talking of fixing what is needed, for which VS help is quite obvious, but setting it to build for ARM only).

We've been wondering the same thing. We've yet to receive any actual info beyond the initial claim of "cmake is not good enough."

[hbelusca]

For example, I am currently working on creating a Visual Studio environment that will allow compilation of (most of) ReactOS to ARM, and in particular, for the Raspberry Pi. In addition to Raspberry Pi, there are many other ARM devices, and being able to generate, quickly, images for these other devices...I can already see how one might do this with Visual Studio. Certainly it is possible to generate images using other methods, but with Visual Studio, it seems so much easier.

Doesn't CMake help a lot for that? It shouldn't be hard to set it to target ARM with either GCC or MSVC, what else have to be done to set the build environment (I'm not talking of fixing what is needed, for which VS help is quite obvious, but setting it to build for ARM only).

We've been wondering the same thing. We've yet to receive any actual info beyond the initial claim of "cmake is not good enough."

Also, there's a "RosBE for ARM" which is quite old now (and unmaintained anymore) and which wants some love