Home

About

Discussion

Recent Discussion

Create New Topic

Membership

Join Now

Login

How to convert the Visual C 6.0 project to Visual Studio NET 2003

Author:		David Gewirtz
Posted:		3/24/2005; 5:46:15 PM
Topic:		How to convert the Visual C 6.0 project to Visual Studio NET 2003
Msg #:		15 (top msg in thread)
Prev/Next:		14/16
Reads:		6741

This lab note is now out of date and can cause some problems with CVS adding and committing. New instructions, using a Visual Studio .NET 2003 project file, are in the rewritten article How to compile Frontier Kernel for Visual Studio .NET 2003. You should definitely be reading that article.

After posting my build instructions for Visual 6++ 6.0 (circa 1998), I got to thinking about Bill Kearney's question of how Frontier would build in a more modern compiler. I decided to test it out, using Microsoft's Visual Studio .NET 2003 version. Below are the steps I followed and afterward, I'll document some of my early results:

1. I started with the already downloaded and CVS-updated Frontier source, as documented in the previous two lab notes. At this point, I had the source installed in H:\My Documents\Frontier and I had the Visual C project file in a build_VC6 folder.
2. I made a copy of the build_VC6 folder and renamed it to build_VC2K3. Inside was the existing frontier.dsp and frontier.dsw folders
3. Next, I launched Visual C++ 2003 and from the File->Open menu, I opened the frontier.dsp project. VC complained about about my source code control, but I ignored it. VC then asked if it could convert my project file, which I let it do. At this point, I once again had Frontier open in Visual C++, but now in the 2003 compiler, rather than a 1998 compiler. Remember, back in 1998, Windows 98 and NT were the big news. A lot's happened since then.
4. Because I took the project file I'd used before, I was already using the Release configuration. Should you need to change the configuration, you'd go to Configuration Manager in the Build menu to change the active configuration. You might recall this feature was listed as "Set Active Configuration" in VC6
5. In order to make sure I was recompiling everything, I selected Rebuild Frontier from the Build menu and let it run.
6. Once this completed, I moved in a copy of Frontier.root and launched the new Frontier.exe file.

The good news is that the program did a complete build with a successful result. Visual Studio .NET 2003 definitely spewed out more error messages (warnings mostly) than did VC6 and I obviously don't know how robust this build is and if there are any compiler-related gotchas we've yet to discover.

That said, I was able to launch and run Frontier.exe, built with a modern Visual C++ compiler. I strongly recommend further testing on the resulting build, but this does look workable. As with my previous build, I did nothing other than attempting to build this sucka. It's very barebones, but it do compile all pretty-like.