Build Successes

After the frustrations of last weekend, I'm glad to report that I have managed to solve both of the outstanding issues that I had. First the IDE issue:

I tried out Eclipse and this was a little better as it allowed me to create an empty project and after a little searching I found a way to link the project to the source folder that I had already setup. However, when I tried to build the project nothing happened. I think the Linux way of doing things is to have a build target and build that but I couldn't figure out how to do it and I don't want to learn how to write make files right now.

I decided to post on the Gamedev forums as they have always been very helpful for me in the past. Sure enough the next day there was a post recommending an IDE called CodeBlocks. I had heard of it before but I didn't realise it was an IDE. This was exactly what I needed and very intuitive which is more than I can say for KDevelop and Eclipse. I created a new project, selected the "Empty Project" template and to add new files I just pointed it at the files I already had. I hit build and it just did its stuff, great!

I checked the CodeBlocks project files into Subversion and then added some more files under Windows. I then went back to Fedora, updated my working copy and built the new version. The benefits of cross platform development made themselves immediately apparent as there was a build error. I had to include a file which was not necessary under VS2005. When I next work on this I'll try setting up some more complex projects.

My second success this weekend was getting a (very simple) wxWidgets project to build. I had two problems. The first were missing libraries and eventually I figured out that the ones I needed were comctl32.lib rpcrt4.lib wxbase28d.lib wxmsw28d_core.lib . The second issue was that in VS2005 by default the character set selected will be unicode and this is not supported in wxWidgets so I had to change that to MultiByte Character Set. Once I did that my little Hello wxWidgets World application built and ran successfully. This will be a good one to try out under Fedora as the wxWidgets library actually uses native controls and so the underlying code being executed is different under each different OS.