Programming Thunderbird in Visual Studio.

For your reading pleasure this week, we have a guest post from Wei Xian Woo. Wei is a student working on Thunderbird as part of UCOSP, and has just had his first bug marked as FIXED. Anyways, that’s enough out of me. Here’s Wei’s post:

Programming Thunderbird in Visual Studio.

During this term’s Undergraduate Capstone Open Source Projects (UCOSP) Code Sprint held at the University of Toronto in January, I wrote a simple Python script for the Thunderbird team to make setting up a Visual C++ project for Thunderbird slightly easier for those of us working on Windows. Blake suggested making this script public so others could benefit from it, so here it is! The script is generic enough to be used for any project, not just Thunderbird. Feel free to use it and make modifications as you see fit :)

Using the script to create a Visual C++ project for Thunderbird

Create an empty Visual C++ project in Visual Studio.

From the command prompt launched by mozilla-build\start-msvc9.bat, do:

python /path/to/refreshvcproj.py
--vcproj=/path/to/thunderbird.vcproj --dir=/path/to/gecko-sdk
--dir=/path/to/mozilla/comm-central/mozilla/xpcom
--dir=/path/to/mozilla/comm-central/mail

All files in the specified directories will be included in the project. I suggest including only the directories you will be working with.

Configuring the project for debugging:

Open the VC++ project file in Visual Studio, and then open the project's Properties.

Go to: Configuration Properties -> Debugging.

Set Command to \path\to\objdir\mozilla\dist\bin\thunderbird.exe

Set Environment to XPCOM_DEBUG_BREAK=warn

And… you’re done!

For better C++ IntelliSense, you might also want to consider getting Visual Assist X (an add-on for VS).

Happy coding!

And you can find the script over here.

Thanks, Wei!