Explain Like I'm Five

[cjr85]

Hello,

I really need to get wxWidgets 3.0.4 up and running with Visual Studio Community 2017 so I can start working on a GUI project at work, but I keep running into all kinds of errors when I try to build wx.dsw. I have found the online resources and previous forum posts very unhelpful because I have no prior knowledge of what I'm doing. I've never used a library that wasn't native to the language or IDE before, as my previous GUI projects have all used Java Swing. I also have extremely minimal C++ experience: I have a vague idea of how the syntax works and what a header file is, but not enough to have a real conversation about it.

tl;dr: Please explain to me how to get wxWidgets up and running, in a way that someone with no coding experience could do it.

[catalin]

You can just open build/msw/wx_vc15.sln with VS 2017 and hit "build all".

But you should really have some coding experience in order to start using c++ libraries...
Good luck!

[cjr85]

I don't seem to have that file...

Attached are all the .sln files I have available. I suspect wx.sln might be the one I'm looking for, but I have tried building that using Batch Build>Select All>Build, but got the following error repeatedly:

fatal error C1083: Cannot open include file: <filename>.h

Don't worry, I do have some coding experience, and I'll be starting with Hello World just to be sure

[doublemax]

Try with wx_vc12.sln. Don't build all, just the two configurations you actually need ("debug" and "release" or "DLL debug" and "DLL release").

However, with VS2017 and 3.0.4 there could be the problem that the installed toolkit version is too new.
If you get build errors, please post the error messages.

[catalin]

..and if you're just starting something, better go with wxWidgets 3.1.1
http://wxwidgets.org/downloads/