[wxruby-users] Building wxruby on windows with Visual C++ Express Edition

[Alex Fenton]

Max Salov wrote:
> Sorry for bothering You with so many questions, 
Your questions are welcome; it's what this list is for.

> but I'm trying to build
> wxruby from svn and wxWindgets 2.8.8 using Visual C++ 2008 Express
>   
Great - it would be good to have more people building from SVN on 
Windows as though the platform's used a lot, the development team are 
primarily OS X & Linux based.

However, I'm pretty sure you can't build wxRuby (or any other ruby 
extension) with Visual Studio 2008. I'm assuming you're using a ruby 
installed from the One-Click or similar (you can check by doing ruby 
-v). The released ruby builds are built with VS 6, and VS2008 can't be 
used to compile extensions for this. You'll get the kind of weird errors 
you seem to be getting.

You have two ways to get around this. You could try and get hold of a 
copy of VS6, but Microsoft don't make it available anywhere. I think I 
may have tracked down a copy in my University Library.

What I would strongly recommend, though, is to look into using MingW - 
which is gcc for Windows, and therefore free. It will soon be used as 
the preferred compiler for Ruby, and wxRuby, on Windows. It takes 
slightly longer to compile, but produces significantly faster-running code.

Luis Lavena provides a handy start pack which includes a a Ruby built 
with mingW, and the compiler.

Mario wrote a pretty comprehensive page about setting up wxRuby for use 
with MingW, from installing MingW to compiling WxWidgets and wxRuby.
http://wxruby.rubyforge.org/wiki/wiki.pl?NotesOnMingW

Very happy to help further with this - might be more appropriate to 
follow up on the -dev list if you want:
http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/wxruby-development

cheers
alex