Re: Problems building pgAdmin with wxWidgets binaries for Windows - Mailing list pgadmin-hackers

Hi Florian,

Thanks a lot for your quick and detailed response.

Yes, I followed those pgAdmin building instructions from the INSTALL file. But I struggled (including discovering that vcbuild has been replaced with msbuild with incompatible switches...) with that stuff for a couple of days and gave up, and was hoping the wxWidgets binaries+headers would be the way to go. I am getting much further with this approach but still failing at the end.

I'm using Visual Studio 2010 Professional (running on 64bit Win 7); not sure if that is a problem. I have noticed that at wxWiki (http://wiki.wxwidgets.org/Microsoft_Visual_C%2B%2B_Guide) they recommend using VC++ 2008 Express edition which, as you pointed out, is not so easy to find anymore. 

But as I said, currently my build fails since 'wxbase28u.lib' is not there. However, 'wxbase29u.lib' is there (because I'm using the 2.9.4 binaries, I assume), but I just don't know why the linker is looking for the 28 version and not the 29 version, and how to change this...

KariK

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From: Florian Klaar <flo.klaar@gmx.de>
To: Kari Karkkainen <kari_karkkainen@yahoo.com>
Cc: "pgadmin-hackers@postgresql.org" <pgadmin-hackers@postgresql.org>
Sent: Sunday, February 10, 2013 2:40 AM
Subject: Re: [pgadmin-hackers] Problems building pgAdmin with wxWidgets binaries for Windows

Hi Kari,

I assume you followed the instructions from pgadmin.org?
http://git.postgresql.org/gitweb/?p=pgadmin3.git;a=blob;f=INSTALL;h=b8ec1a51fd877efc1be701f4ed938b92daf219fc;hb=REL-1_16_0_PATCHES
I was struggling with wxWidgets on Windows as well since the instructions didn't seem to work with my installation of VC++ 2010 Express. I'm no expert on this, but my guess is that it'll still be easier to get wxWidgets 2.8 to work than make pgAdmin compile with version 2.9.
You didn't mention which version of Visual C++ you are using, but I wanted to use the Express edition and ended up having to install both VC 2008 Express and 2010 Express to make the supplied build-wxmsw.bat work and at as well be able to open the pgAdmin solution file.

My rather clumsy and trial-and-error-driven approach was (from memory):
- Use VC 2008 Express to execute pgAdmin's supplied build-wxmsw.bat, since VC 2010 Express doesn't seem to include vcbuild.exe any more.
However, 2008's vcbuild.exe didn't recognize wxWidget's .dsp files as project files (the error message was something like "make sure the file is from VC++4 or newer bla"), so I opened all the needed .dsp files one by one in VC 2008 Express using File -> Open -> Project (NOT File -> Open -> File!). For each project file, VC asked to upgrade it, which I confirmed, causing VC to kindly generate a .vcproj file for the respective .dsp file. This is the first part of what pgAdmin's build-wxmsw.bat was supposed to do.
- Then (still in VC 2008) I executed build-wxmsw.bat again in order to build the binaries. Which worked, as far as I remember.
- Since pgAdmin's solution file is for version 2010, use VC 2010 Express to open it.

I also had to change a few of the project's include paths in order for VC to find all the needed external libraries when compiling pgAdmin, but that's no biggie. I also wasn't aware at the beginning that I had to download the binary distributions of the libraries and not the source packages. But that may be due to my general lack of experience with these things.
Took me an evening to work all this out, but at least I learned something new along the way.

Oh BTW, if you need to get VC++ 2008 Express from the web, make sure the web installer you are using does indeed download version 2008 and not 2010. Microsoft seems to have replaced the old installer with the new one in place, so many old links found on the web that are labeled "2008" actually point to the 2010 installer now. This was almost driving me nuts :-)

Hope this helps.
Florian