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How to compile Frontier Kernel for Visual Studio .NET 2003

Author:		David Gewirtz
Posted:		3/31/2005; 6:23:29 PM
Topic:		How to compile Frontier Kernel for Visual Studio .NET 2003
Msg #:		20 (top msg in thread)
Prev/Next:		19/21
Reads:		5836

This is a revision of the original How to convert the Visual C 6.0 project to Visual Studio NET 2003 lab note, which showed how to take the Visual C++ 6.0 project and convert it to Visual Studio .NET 2003 and contained some troublesome errors. This article describes how to download the latest CVS version and build using the now-available Visual Studio .NET 2003 build directory.

The first thing you should do is install a CVS client. I tried both WinCVS and TortoiseCVS. I strongly recommend TortoiseCVS, available here.

Choosing your CVS download option based on whether you're a project developer or using anonymous access

If you're going to be enabled as a project developer (meaning you send changes back to the repository), you'll want to follow my instructions in Adding files to the Frontier CVS repository.

If you just want to download the project anonymously, I recomment you still use TortoiseCVS, but this time you'll want to use the following line in the CVSROOT field:

:pserver:anonymous@cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/frontierkernel

You should still follow the instructions above, reading the section on checking out the Frontier Kernel. I wrote another full lab note at Setting up CVS to update FrontierKernel source that talks about checking out the kernel using WinCVS which is also valid, but I've found I like TortoiseCVS much better.

Building the kernel

Once you've downloaded the full CVS, the build process is very straightforward.

1. Launch the Visual C .NET 3003 development environment.
2. Open the project Frontier.vcproj, located in the build_VC2K3 folder.
3. From the Build menu, select Build Solution. Yep, Frontier's now a solution. Aren't ya proud?
4. I'm building using the debug configuration, so the newly created frontier.exe file will show up in the debug directory, located in the build_VC2K3 directory.
5. You won't be able to run Frontier with just the frontier.exe file. You'll need to download frontier.root from http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/frontierkernel/Frontier10.0a1win.zip?download. This is also reachable from the Root Databases section at http://frontierkernel.sourceforge.net page.
6. Extract the frontier.root file and put it in the debug directory alongside frontier.exe.
7. Now execute frontier.exe. If you've never run Frontier before, you might not realize it opens initially with a little cactus icon in the task bar. Go ahead and double-click that and you'll get a fully running version of Frontier.

Now, go forth and write great code!