As part of MozillaBuild, I’ve been testing various combinations of compilers and SDKs. It turns out that it is possible to build Mozilla (trunk) using the Free Microsoft Visual C++ Express download with an appropriate SDK and a couple hacks. I have a bug to make MozillaBuild support the free compiler, with a patch that mostly-works.

The ATL headers have a special instruction which requires a library atlthunk.lib, which doesn’t ship with the SDK. The Mozilla Build FAQ has an ingenious solution to this problem which requires editing the SDK headers. Unfortunately, patching other people’s software is not a good idea in general. I’ve found another way around this problem by creating a replacement atlthunk.lib library which contains the two required functions. Source code is currently here. MSVC Express can build the replacement library, as long as you have your INCLUDE, BIN, LIB environment variables set up with SDK paths properly. I’m hoping to include the library as part of MozillaBuild, so that Mozilla code will build “out of the box” with MSVC Express.

The MFCEmbed example will not build with MSVC Express unless you build MFC yourself (which is painful). But MFCEmbed is not part of Firefox builds anyway (and should probably be disabled completely, since it’s an unmaintained bug-ridden mess).

This entry was posted on 22 Dec, 2006 at 5:48 pm and is tagged with , build-system. Trackback.