What is

Microsoft Visual Studio 2003 and early version of that popular programming environment supports what is called “Makefile Projects”. That kind of project can carry complex file trees and the rules for building, re-building and clear the project. But in reality the file tree is just a convenience and the rules are merely a command line script to prepare calls to “nmake.exe”.

Features

Code completion, IntelliSense, “Go to definition”, “Go to declaration” and step by step debugging works almost as good as in a regular Visual Studio Project.

How to use

To use GDAL’s Visual Studio Makefile Projects you can load directly the projects file makegdal71.vcproj or makegdal80.vcproj if you are using Visual Studio 2003 or Visual Studio 2005 respectively. Check the configuration and select one of the build option on the "Build" menu.

Configuration

To change GDAL build options select on "Solution Explorer" the nmake.opt file: makegdal/Make Files/nmake.opt and follow the instruction in the previous page.

You can change the way you prefer to call "nmake -f makefile.vc" in debugging or releasing mode by opening from the "Project Properties/NMake".

You can either change the debugging option on "Project Properties/Debugging".

Update

The .vcproj files are constantly updated but not automatically so it is possible that the file tree could be missing a new driver or a new utility source code in GDAL but that will not going to affect the compilation.

If you want to generate a updated version of the project file or if you want to generate project files to a newer version of Visual Studio you can run the batch script “makegdal_gen.bat “ as follows:

C:\Dev\gdal>makegdal_gen
Usage: makegdal_gen "MS Visual C++ version" > makegdalNN.vcproj
Examples:
   makegdal_gen 7.10 > makegdal71.vcproj
   makegdal_gen 8.00 > makegdal80.vcproj