wxWidgets Installation Notes

Ashwin Nanjappa

http://www.comp.nus.edu.sg/~ashwinna/

Installation

• Download the wxWidgets Windows installer (wxMSW) and install it. It installs the directory structure and the source code. The code still needs to be compiled into libraries for usage.

• Add the environment variable WX_WIDGETS_ROOT with value as the directory where wxWidgets was installed. (Ex: C:\Program Files\wxWidgets-2.8.9)

• Edit $(WX_WIDGETS_ROOT)\include\wx\msw\setup.h and change:

  • To use the OpenGL canvas of wxWidgets, set wxUSE_GLCANVAS to 1.

  • To redirect cout or cerr to a text control, set wxUSE_STD_IOSTREAM to 1.

• Open $(WX_WIDGETS_ROOT)\build\msw\wx.dsw and build the Debug and Release versions for static libraries. By default it builds as Multi-threaded Debug DLL. Go to each individual sub-project and change property of C/C++ → Code Generation → RunTimeLibary to Multi-threaded Debug/Release.

Usage

In your Visual Studio project, make these changes:

• Include directories:

  • $(WX_WIDGETS_ROOT)/include
  • $(WX_WIDGETS_ROOT)/lib/vc_lib/mswd

• Library directories:

  • $(WX_WIDGETS_ROOT)/lib/vc_lib

• wxWidgets is a GUI library, using it will change your program into a Window application. It is no longer a Console application. This means that the console no longer appears and also that main() function is no longer invoked.

  • Go to Linker → System → Subsystem and change its value from CONSOLE to WINDOWS.

  • Remove _CONSOLE from Include directives.

• Link with the following libraries:

  (Remove the d for release versions)

  • comctl32.lib (Windows Common controls (commctrl.h))
  • rpcrt4.lib (Windows RPC (rpc.h))
  • wxbase28d.lib (wxWidgets Base)
  • wxmsw28d_core.lib (wxWidgets MS Windows Base Core)
  • wxmsw28d_gl.lib (wxWidgets MS Windows OpenGL)

Multisampling support for wxGLCanvas

(Only if you want to use multisampling.)

From:

https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&atid=309863&aid=1915804&group_id=9863

Patch these files:

• $(WX_WIDGETS_ROOT)/include/wx/glcanvas.h
• $(WX_WIDGETS_ROOT)/include/wx/msw/glcanvas.h
• $(WX_WIDGETS_ROOT)/src/msw/glcanvas.cpp

In the source file add the following lines:

int attribList[] = {WX_GL_RGBA,
                    WX_GL_DOUBLEBUFFER,
                    WX_GL_SAMPLE_BUFFERS, GL_TRUE, // Required only for multi-sampling (AA)
                    WX_GL_SAMPLES, 4,              // Required only for supersampling
                    WX_GL_DEPTH_SIZE, 16,
                    0, 0};

Change the constructor to:

wxGLCanvas(..., attribList)

Note that all the attributes need to be set in the attribList. Just setting the interesting values of GL_SAMPLE_BUFFERS do not work causing glewInit() to fail.