grpc/vsprojects

Pre-generated MS Visual Studio project & solution files

DEPRECATED, please use cmake instead (it can generate Visual Studio projects for you). We will continue providing pre-generated VS projects for a while, but we will likely get rid of them entirely at some point.

Pre-generated MS Visual Studio projects used to be the recommended way to build on Windows, but there were some limitations:

• hard to build dependencies, expecially boringssl (deps usually support cmake quite well)
• the nuget-based openssl & zlib dependencies are hard to maintain and update. We've received issues indicating that they are flawed.
• .proto codegen is hard to support in Visual Studio directly (but we have a pretty decent support in cmake)
• It's a LOT of generated files. We prefer not to have too much generated code in our github repo.

Versions 2013 and 2015 are both supported. You can use their respective community editions.

Building

We are using NuGet to pull zlib and openssl dependencies. If you don't have Visual Studio NuGet plugin installed, you'll need to download nuget.exe from the web and manually restore the NuGet packages.

> REM Run from this directory.
> REM No need to do this if you have NuGet visual studio extension.
> nuget restore grpc.sln

After that, you can build the solution using one of these options:

1. open grpc.sln with Visual Studio and hit "Build".
2. build from commandline using msbuild grpc.sln /p:Configuration=Debug

C/C++ Test Dependencies

• gtest isn't available as a git repo like the other dependencies. download it and add it to /third_party/gtest/ (the folder will end up with /build-aux/, /cmake/, /codegear/, etc. folders in it).
  * if using vs2013: open/import the gtest solution in /msvc/, and save over the first solution (you will have to change it from read-only). change all projects to use /MDd (Property Pages - C/C++ - Code Generation - Runtime Library) and build. This is a "multithreaded debug" setting and it needs to match grpc. * build all
• open protobuf solution in /third_party/protobuf/vsprojects * if using vs2013: on import the gtest stuff will probably fail, I think the paths are interpreted wrong. it's ok. * tests and test_plugin will fail when built. also ok * build all
• gflags is automatically imported as a git submodule but it needs to have CMake run on it to be ready for a specific platform * download CMake windows installer; install * open visual studio developer command prompt (not sure if dev command prompt is necessary) * run cmake <path to gtest directory> * this will build a .sln and fill up the /third_party/gflags/include/gflags/ directory with headers * build all
• install NuGet * nuget should automatically bring in built versions of zlib and openssl when building grpc.sln (the versions in /third_party/ are not used). If it doesn't work use tools->nuget...->manage.... The packages are put in /vsprojects/packages/

Building protoc plugins

For generating service stub code, gRPC relies on plugins for protoc (the protocol buffer compiler). The solution grpc_protoc_plugins.sln allows you to build Windows .exe binaries of gRPC protoc plugins.

• Follow instructions in third_party\protobuf\cmake\README.md to create Visual Studio 2013 projects for protobuf.

  $ cd third_party/protobuf/cmake
  $ mkdir build & cd build
  $ mkdir solution & cd solution
  $ cmake -G "Visual Studio 12 2013" -Dprotobuf_BUILD_TESTS=OFF ../..
  

• Open solution third_party\protobuf\cmake\build\solution\protobuf.sln and build it in Release mode. That will build libraries libprotobuf.lib and libprotoc.lib needed for the next step.

• Open solution vsprojects\grpc_protoc_plugins.sln and build it in Release mode. As a result, you should obtain a set of gRPC protoc plugin binaries (grpc_cpp_plugin.exe, grpc_csharp_plugin.exe, ...)