Building C++ supporting libraries on my small dev machine. Looking at another pass of C++/CLI work and some more thinking about motion capture options.

I’ve built zlib and bzlib2 yesterday. To get these building with VS 2017 I built them with their standard build procedures (which appeared to build 32 bit libraries) and then created visual studio 2017 projects to build the same pieces using fresh settings.

I’ve got boost, openssl, opencv and the mongodb c and c++ libraries on my list for today. The mongodb libraries are my primary target here though all of the above are of interest. This is also what is driving my CMake reading as several of these libraries use CMake for their builds.

I’m pretty interested in C++/CLI as a way to get access to C and C++ functionality from C#. Given the productivity that C# provides, access to C and C++ APIs and libraries from that environment would help quite a bit. My primary driver was access to the Win32 file ID API for some file management work, but Win32 APIs keep coming up now and again. I do need to take a look as some newer C# libraries that Malcolm suggested that may provide pre-packaged access here.

In the past, I’ve run into build issues when combining C# and C++/CLI in the same project. I expect this was setup issues so I’m now looking to take a more serious look at this.

The motion capture work will start out with OpenCV and getting my web cams running with code behind them to process the images. I’m thinking that pre-recording things and then post processing might be a good idea…using a light strobe to synchronize things could simplify time sync as well. Much to consider…

Next Steps

I’ve got boost, zlib and libbz2 built on boojum now. Next step will be to test the installs with a small program or two. Hoping that all went well and I have usable, native, win64 libraries available.

Once those have been checked out I’ll take another run at building the MongoDB drivers…this time on boojum rather than chaos. Boojum has a shorter history and is distinctly less cluttered than chaos so I’m hoping that this just works. Expecting less than that though…I’ll probably need to dig deeper into he CMake configs to get where I want to go. I’ll update as I move forward…now off to lunch though.