Setting up a dev environment for the MSVC toolchain (Visual Studio 2022) for Windows

Instructions for building, running, and debugging Dissolve in Visual Studio 2022 with CMake, using the developer Powershell tool to install dependencies.

Introduction

Outlined below is a step-by-step guide to setting up a development environment on Windows using Visual Studio 2022.

Basic requirements

Install Microsoft Visual Studio 2022, and use the Visual Studio Installer application to install the “Desktop Development with C++” workload.

You will also need the Developer Powershell for VS2022 application in which you can run powershell scripts, which should come packaged with Visual Studio.

Download the Dissolve Github repository using the full Visual Studio 2022 Git integration for a streamlined development experience. Visual Studio will ask you sign in to GitHub with your credentials if you want to do this.

Install dependencies using powershell script

Open Developer Powershell for VS2022 from Windows as administrator (since system environment variables are modified), and navigate to the Dissolve Visual Studio repo folder.

Run the following Powershell command to enable scripts:

Set-ExecutionPolicy Bypass -Scope Process

There is a pre-packaged Powershell script (develop.ps1) which can be run from the top-level of the Dissolve project directory:

./develop.ps1 -qtVersion 6.4.2

This script can be used to install the following packages into a dependencies folder:

  • Qt6
  • Freetype
  • FTGL
  • Antlr4
  • Java

A specific version of Qt can be specified for installation via the -qtVersion parameter (i.e. 6.4.2). If you have an existing system Qt6 installation, the script can default to using this by ignoring the -qtVersion parameter. Ensure that the system Qt msvc2019_64 binaries (bin) and CMake module (lib\cmake) directories are added to the PATH prior to using your own Qt installation.

The script defaults to configuring dependencies for Debug. If you want to develop in Release mode, use the appropriate flag:

./develop.ps1 -release -qtVersion 6.4.2

The output of the script is a custom CMakeUserPresets.json which contains configurations for building Dissolve CLI and GUI with CMake.

Configure Dissolve in Visual Studio with CMake support

In Visual Studio, open the Dissolve repo. In the configurations dropdown you should see either

  • CLI-Debug (CLI-Debug-MSVC)
  • GUI-Debug (GUI-Debug-MSVC)

or

  • CLI-Release (CLI-Release-MSVC)
  • GUI-Release (GUI-Release-MSVC)

listed as available configurations. These are the user presets that we will be targetting to develop Dissolve in Visual Studio.

Once the preferred preset is selected, right-click the Dissolve CMakeLists.txt in the Visual Studio solution explorer, and select Configure Cache. This should start the CMake configuration process, which involves using the Conan package manager to install the remaining dependencies. Visual Studio may have been set up to do this automatically when the project is opened, or if any saved changes are made to CMakeLists.txt.

Note: on configuration, you may experience a Conan error “locked by another concurrent conan process”. Typically this can be resolved using the command conan remove --locks in a developer powershell. If this does not work, navigate to your C drive .conan folder and delete the data sub-directory.

Build project

Once configuration is complete, make sure to select the correct target executable from the startup item dropdown in Visual Studio. This will be either:

  • Dissolve.exe (CLI version)
  • Dissolve-GUI.exe (GUI version)

From the Build menu, select Build <EXECUTABLE>.

Last modified February 13, 2025: fix: Allow variable Qt6 version in powershell (#2056) (d9517c1ba)