Windows 10 Build Instructions

[weston-nrl]

This is asked frequently, so here are verified instructions to build MGEN on Windows 10.

Download Visual Studio Community 2019 Installer (free for this use) and run the installer:

• https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/downloads/
• Workloads: Check “Desktop Development with C++”
• Leave default Optional packages
• Install, and reboot when prompted

Open Visual Studio

• Clone a repo: https://github.com/USNavalResearchLaboratory/mgen.git
• File->Clone a repo: https://github.com/USNavalResearchLaboratory/protolib.git and change local path so that it goes INSIDE of mgen as mgen\protolib
• Double-click on ‘mgen’ on the left
• Double-click on mgen.sln from makefiles\win32
• Switch view to the ‘mgen’ Solution (or exit out of Visual Studio and re-open it, it should appear on the start screen)
• ‘mgen’ and ‘Protokit’ should both appear under solutions
• On the dropdown up at the top, where it says ‘Debug’ and ‘Win32’, select ‘Release’ instead of ‘Debug’. Leave ‘Win32’ alone.
• Right-click on ‘mgen’ on the left and select Build

Once it has built successfully, ‘mgen.exe’ should show up in mgen\makefiles\win32\Release (default location is C:\Users\Your Username\source\repos\mgen\makefiles\win32\Release)

To run mgen.exe to another PC, you only need to copy mgen.exe

• If you get errors running MGEN on another system referencing a VCRUNTIME or ucrtbase DLL, you may need to get the latest Microsoft Visual C++ Redistributable for Visual Studio 2019 from https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/2977003/the-latest-supported-visual-c-downloads -- you probably need to install both the 32-bit (x86) and 64-bit (x64) versions. Reboot when prompted. It is not clear to me if this step is actually required, as my other system already had it installed when I tried, and it’s not clear if uninstalling the packages actually removes all of the files
• If you mistakenly build the Debug version instead of the Release version as noted above, you will not be able to run it on a system that does not have a similar Visual Studio installation, as the Debug system libraries are not part of the Visual C++ Redistributable. In that case, you will get errors referencing VCRUNTIME140D.dll, ucrtbased.dll when you try to run it.