Every time that I try to develop for windows (with Visual Studio), I have a hard time. And I do this so infrequently, that I tend to forget stuff too. I now try to make a windows version of Imhotep, Pyramid Builder.Here I will document some gotchas when developing under windows.
- It turns out that for 64bit builds that use libSDL2, you need to add some inputs to the linker, being: winmm.lib, Imm32.lib, version.lib libraries.
- What's up with the '32' suffix for 64 bit builds? Somehow you still need to link Imm32 and OpenGL32 and not Imm64 or OpenGL64?
- The best way to generate new project files is to copy them from an old project, and edit the XML contents.
- Don't use a full screen app and a full screen debugger at the same time. If you hit a breakpoint, the apps fight over the screen, and you cannot control the debugger any more.
- Win32 builds cannot handle functions that take four __m256 arguments. Three is fine, but for the fourth, the compiler craps out with the message "formal parameter with requested alignment of 32 won't be aligned."
- To get rid of the generated .iobj and .ipdb files, change the Linker/Optimization/Link Time Code Generation option to something other than /LTCG:Incremental.
- Before creating my .exe file, Visual Studio creates a .lib and .exp by the same name. I don't know why. Configuration is set to Application(.exe) so why create the lib?