Creating and Compiling a C++ project on Windows

Question

I need to work on C++ project on my windows machine. My project will consist of various classes(.h and .cpp) as well as the startup file to start the application. The preliminary design is simple but the application has the potential to gain complexity as time goes by. What I need here is ideas to set up the C++ project compiler/IDE/Makefile etc..etc. as well as some standard tools besides Visual C++ to compile/build/link projects such as these on a Windows OS.

Thanks

Answer 1

I would recommend that you install MSYS/MINGW and have your program compile with it as well as visual studio.

Answer 2

Eclipse C++ (CDT) along with Mingw or Cywgin are pretty nice, if you don't have Visual Studio.

http://www.eclipse.org/cdt/

If you want a full UNIX or POSIX standard style toolset, use Cywgin by itself.

Answer 3

Both the eclipse and NetBeans IDEs are available for Windows and support C/C++ development, as well as avariety of other languages.

They both also support a fairly wide range of plug-ins for a variety of tasks.

Answer 4

I've used mingw and netbeans to develop on Windows. I chose Netbeans because it isn't excessively complicated to learn and is cross platform. I didn't like eclipse because it was in my opinion overly complex and the debugger didn't work for me in windows.

Answer 5

Use the Express version of Visual Studio.

M.

Answer 6

If you already have Visual Studio installed, it has everything you want. I can't think of anything else except the following,

1. A diff tool - eg. winmerge
2. Version control plugin - eg. AnkhSVN
3. Hex editor (VS hex editor- not so useful for huge binary files) - eg. hxd

Answer 7

I recommend Qt Creator. It comes with MinGW out of the box and is a superb IDE. Well worth a download.

Answer 8

I've used both NetBeans and Qt Creator. From an extensibility and UI perspective I prefer NetBeans. It has a nice collection of tools and add-ons (though they recently stopped supporting UML modeling) and it seems easier to navigate your class structure and the like.

Qt Creator, I think, takes a little more getting used to, but it is easier to use when you're developing apps with multiple libraries... of course it might be that I just haven't discovered how to do that in NetBeans yet ;).

Answer 9

Try the GCC tool chain on Cygwin.