[vtkusers] How to introduce the VTK in the Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 MFC

[John Drescher]

On Wed, Mar 6, 2013 at 6:09 AM, Jon Haitz Legarreta
<jhlegarreta at vicomtech.org> wrote:
> Hi there,
> if you have already built VTK and you are looking for a way to use and link
> a project of your own agains VTK, this is a good starting point:
> http://www.vtk.org/Wiki/VTK/Tutorials/CMakeListsFile
>
> If you have not built VTK yet, this may be useful:
> http://www.vtk.org/Wiki/VTK/Building
>
> When you run CMake, it will ask which compiler you will be using, and that
> is where you will choose MS VS2008.
>
> It is highly recommended to use CMake because it will save you time in the
> project configuration process.
>

I also (as a long time windows developer) highly recommend using CMake
for project generation especially with Visual Studio. One of the
biggest benefits is that it greatly simplifies the project
configuration process with large libraries like vtk that have dozens
to hundreds of modules. It also makes it very simple to switch
compilers or to build the same source with multiple compilers at the
same time. I recommend using a totally independent build tree from the
source tree to facilitate this. On to of this CMake supports packaging
with nsis and the builtin unit testing. I find these extremely useful
for my projects. These are just a few of the added benefits of using
CMake. I could not possibly list all in a single email..

John