[vtkusers] The basics of setting up VTK in Windows

[John Drescher]

On Fri, May 8, 2009 at 9:22 AM, Steve Chall <stevec at renci.org> wrote:
> Colleagues,
>
> I’ve had reasonable success setting up, maintaining and using VTK with
> GCC/g++ in a Linux environment for a couple of years now.  However, I have a
> new project coming up that stipulates that I use VTK in C++ within Microsoft
> Visual Studio 2008, and I’m not sure where to look for guidelines for
> practical setup:  where to put the include files and libraries, the best way
> to let Visual Studio know where they are.  I downloaded and ran the Windows
> 5.4.0 installer, which seems to have only installed a tiny sample program
> and none of the other stuff one needs to build VTK apps.  I’ve also
> downloaded and decompressed the Source, Data, and Documentation files.  For
> some reason the docs are not externally accessible to me, and at this point
> rudimentary questions are proliferating wildly.  I’m sure there are
> thousands of successful setups just like I want to create, and that I’m
> missing something really basic and probably obvious.  Can someone point me
> to a Getting Started and Setup guide for VTK with VC++?  Thanks.
>
>

My advice, is to use CMake to generate your Visual Studio project
files and build VTK from source with the same compiler you will use
for your application.

Letting VS manage the project files will only lead to headaches with
includes, and linking.

John