[micro-manager-general] Rebuilding MM under Windows - some issues

[Graham B. <gba...@pr...>]

Hi all,

I work for Prior Scientific.  MM has drivers for the old Prior NanoScanZ controller, but we've found out (during development for our new controller) that these drivers don't support auto acquisition and camera auto-focus - you can drive the Z stage up and down manually, but the driver throws an error if you hook it up to automation.  I'm looking at fixing those drivers.
  
Which of course means I need to be able to compile MM.  I've hit a few problems there which I think should go in your docs.  (Or of course if people can tell me where I've made a mistake, I'll make a note of that myself so that I don't make the same mistake twice.)

1) The Windows SDK 7.1 won't install out of the box on current Windows.  Note that this applies to Windows 7 as well - my PC runs Windows 10, but I do my development in a Windows 7 VM.  Windows 7 with full updates will not install the SDK either.  I found a fix for this at https://stackoverflow.com/questions/31455926/windows-sdk-7-1-setup-failure.  It involves some minor tinkering with registry entries, but it seemed to work OK.

2) Visual Studio 2010 Express is no longer supported by MS.  You can still download it (from the link in your docs), but MS have turned off the license server.  If you can't get a license for it, you've got 30 days to use it and then it stops working.  Someone asked this already on Reddit, and someone else responded with valid license keys which can be used - see  https://www.reddit.com/r/VisualStudio/comments/7xx6yb/cant_register_visual_studio_2010_express/.

Of course these license keys will be in use by other people somewhere too, but since the license server is down there's no way for the application to find out, so it's all good.  There are various other suggestions online, such as scheduling a task every day to tweak the registry entry which tracks the days left on the grace period, but it's much easier just to use those license keys.

For our development at Prior, we use Visual Studio 2013 Express.  This is also not supported by MS, but the license server for that still works.  I've considered moving us to Visual Studio 2017 Express for Desktop, but code built with Visual Studio 2013 still works on Windows 10 so I haven't had a strong reason to change.  Since Visual Studio 2010 is completely dead though, have you considered moving on?

3) Several device adaptors fail to build because they can't find files under the "3rdparty" directory.  The build instructions do not say how to get the "3rdparty" directory from SVN.  I suggest they should, because not only can people like myself not build MM completely, but also anyone wanting to add new "3rdparty" files can't tell whether they're going to clash with anything that's already there. 

All that said though, the Prior device adaptor builds OK, so I can get on with my fixes. :)

Cheers,

	Graham.