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

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

Cool, thanks Nico.  Good to hear that a Visual Studio upgrade is on the way - I won't worry too much about that then.

Cheers,

	Graham.

-----Original Message-----
From: Stuurman, Nico <Nic...@uc...> 
Sent: 16 October 2019 17:43
To: Micro-Manager General <mic...@li...>
Subject: Re: [micro-manager-general] Rebuilding MM under Windows - some issues

Hi Graham,

> 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.

Great to hear that you are working on this!

> 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://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__stackoverflow.com_questions_31455926_windows-2Dsdk-2D7-2D1-2Dsetup-2Dfailure&d=DwICAg&c=iORugZls2LlYyCAZRB3XLg&r=UwP8SWqih8VHO1LwZpgcx83I4o21yLj6V6QD-25Dt4I&m=f1SoyNficl1IWesWC6CZmqMjzeAxWJvYjKXJ6TNfUWA&s=Fg3qPH1Qys5BNMBnSkugoF30BqAeLwJSPjFO6vq2RyM&e= .  It involves some minor tinkering with registry entries, but it seemed to work OK.

I don't remember all the details, but last time I installed a full development environment was on Windows 10, and things went unexpectedly smoothly (should have taken notes and updated documentation), mainly following the instructions on MM website.

> 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://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__www.reddit.com_r_VisualStudio_comments_7xx6yb_cant-5Fregister-5Fvisual-5Fstudio-5F2010-5Fexpress_&d=DwICAg&c=iORugZls2LlYyCAZRB3XLg&r=UwP8SWqih8VHO1LwZpgcx83I4o21yLj6V6QD-25Dt4I&m=f1SoyNficl1IWesWC6CZmqMjzeAxWJvYjKXJ6TNfUWA&s=98nIMEauHkcFD_ZLzNTIFmSGFDXgvD5yrtLwfblEWK4&e= .
>
> 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.

I ended up doing the same, even though I have tens of license keys for
VS2010 already registered.

> 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?

The plan is to move to VS2019.  It should be pretty straight forward, and hopefully this will happen in the not too distant future.

> 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.

3rdparty contains libraries/code that we are not allowed to make public by the owners of that code (as opposed to the code in 3rdpartypublic). So, if you really want to compile those device adapters (but why should you, you can always get the binaries from our build servers), you will need to get those dependencies yourself and place them in a 3rdarty directory that sits next to your micro-manager source code tree, and has the files in the same organization as the ones in our 3rdparty directory (which you can glean from the project file).  .

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

Perfect!  Email me (off-line) a patch when you are done.  Also, I can give you write access to the Prior code in our svn repository, so that you can update the code yourself.


Best,


Nico


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