Building with Visual Studio Code

Install requirements

For the best experience install Visual Studio before Visual Studio Code.

• The latest Microsoft Visual Studio (Preview) from https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/ with the following options installed:
  • C++ core desktop features
  • C++ CMake tools
  • Windows 10 (or newer) SDK
• git from: https://git-scm.com/
• The Vulkan SDK from: https://www.lunarg.com/vulkan-sdk/ with the following options installed:
  • The Vulkan SDK Core (Always Installed)
  • Vulkan Memory Allocator header.
• optional: RenderDoc (for Vulkan debugging) from: https://renderdoc.org/
• optional: Doxygen (for documentation generation) from: https://www.doxygen.nl/
• Visual Studio Code from https://code.visualstudio.com/ with the following extensions installed:
  • C/C++ (Microsoft)
  • C/C++ Extension Pack (Microsoft)
  • C/C++ Themes (Microsoft)
  • C/C++ TestMate Legacy (Mate Pek)
  • CMake (twxs)
  • CMake Tools (Microsoft)
  • Test Adapter Convert (Microsoft)
  • Test Explorer UI (Holger Benl)

Setup Visual Studio

We offer a curated list of required Visual Studio components in .github\.vsconfig. You can import this file using the Visual Studio Installer.

Setup VSCode

We offer a curated list of C++ project extensions in .vscode\extensions.json. To activate automatic installation of these recommendations, modify "extensions.ignoreRecommendations" to false in your .vscode\settings.json. This will allow receiving our extension suggestions. After installation, you might want to set it back to true to avoid continuous recommendation notifications during development.

Clone the HikoGUI project from github

Clone the HikoGUI repository on your machine:

git clone git@github.com:hikogui/hikogui.git

Building and running

You can then open the hikogui directory with Open Folder... inside Visual Studio Code.

To build:

1. In the bottom status bar select [MSVC-x64-Debug], [Library + Demo] and [hikogui_demo].
2. In the bottom status bar press the Build option to build.
3. Press the little turtle or play buttom from the bottom status bar to debug or run the demo.

Note: A "Window Security Alert" may show up, this is due to the RenderDoc API creating a network server so that the RenderDoc application can remotely communicate to the hikogui_demo application.

Other configurations that are possible to build:

• [MSVC-x64-Debug] Make a debug build
• [MSVC-x64-RelWithDebInfo] Make an fully optimized build
• [MSVC-x64-Release] Make a fully optimized build and build all examples and demos.
• [MSVC-Analysis] Build with static-analysis.

Common build problems:

• If you get "permission denied", this may be due to a still running process like a hung hikogui_test.exe. Terminate that process using the Task Manager.
• You may also get "permission denied" when during building a compiler-crash causes a file to be written without any permissions associated at all. This can be solved by rebooting the computer and followed by deleting the CMake cache.
• There are two Test Explorer due to two test extensions being installed. Only the Test Explorer with more details will be able to debug individual tests.