Re: Problems building pgAdmin with wxWidgets binaries for Windows

Hi Kari,

I assume you followed the instructions from pgadmin.org?
http://git.postgresql.org/gitweb/?p=pgadmin3.git;a=blob;f=INSTALL;h=b8ec1a51fd877efc1be701f4ed938b92daf219fc;hb=REL-1_16_0_PATCHES
I was struggling with wxWidgets on Windows as well since the
instructions didn't seem to work with my installation of VC++ 2010
Express. I'm no expert on this, but my guess is that it'll still be
easier to get wxWidgets 2.8 to work than make pgAdmin compile with
version 2.9.
You didn't mention which version of Visual C++ you are using, but I
wanted to use the Express edition and ended up having to install both VC
2008 Express and 2010 Express to make the supplied build-wxmsw.bat work
and at as well be able to open the pgAdmin solution file.

My rather clumsy and trial-and-error-driven approach was (from memory):
- Use VC 2008 Express to execute pgAdmin's supplied build-wxmsw.bat,
since VC 2010 Express doesn't seem to include vcbuild.exe any more.
However, 2008's vcbuild.exe didn't recognize wxWidget's .dsp files as
project files (the error message was something like "make sure the file
is from VC++4 or newer bla"), so I opened all the needed .dsp files one
by one in VC 2008 Express using File -> Open -> Project (NOT File ->
Open -> File!). For each project file, VC asked to upgrade it, which I
confirmed, causing VC to kindly generate a .vcproj file for the
respective .dsp file. This is the first part of what pgAdmin's
build-wxmsw.bat was supposed to do.
- Then (still in VC 2008) I executed build-wxmsw.bat again in order to
build the binaries. Which worked, as far as I remember.
- Since pgAdmin's solution file is for version 2010, use VC 2010 Express
to open it.

I also had to change a few of the project's include paths in order for
VC to find all the needed external libraries when compiling pgAdmin, but
that's no biggie. I also wasn't aware at the beginning that I had to
download the binary distributions of the libraries and not the source
packages. But that may be due to my general lack of experience with
these things.
Took me an evening to work all this out, but at least I learned
something new along the way.

Oh BTW, if you need to get VC++ 2008 Express from the web, make sure the
web installer you are using does indeed download version 2008 and not
2010. Microsoft seems to have replaced the old installer with the new
one in place, so many old links found on the web that are labeled "2008"
actually point to the 2010 installer now. This was almost driving me
nuts :-)

Hope this helps.
Florian