Compiling on Windows with Visual Studio

This page summarizes how to compile RTT with Microsoft Visual Studio, using the native win32 api. RTT supports Windows out of the box from RTT 1.10.0 and 2.3.0 on. OCL is supported from 1.12.0 and 2.3.0 on.

This tutorial assumes you extracted the Orocos sources and all its dependencies in c:\orocos

For new users, RTT/OCL v2.3.x or later is recommended, included in the Orocos Toolchain v2.3.x.

Rationale

We only support Visual Studio 2008 and 2005. Support for 2010 is on its way. You're invited to try VS2010 out and suggest patches to the orocos-dev mailing list.

Orocos does not come with a Visual Studio Solution. You need to generate one using the CMake tool which you can download from http://www.cmake.org. The most important step for CMake is to set the paths to where the dependencies of Orocos are installed. So before you can get to building Orocos, you need to build its dependencies, which don't use CMake, but their own build mechanism.

Only RTT and OCL of the toolchain are supported on Windows. The ruby based 'orogen' and 'typegen' tools, part of the toolchain, are not supported. Also ROS integration is not supported on Windows.

Important notice about Release or Debug

RTT Dependencies

CORBA using ACE/TAO (optional)

You must have this set as system environment variables:

set ACE_ROOT=c:\orocos\ACE_wrappers
set TAO_ROOT=%ACE_ROOT%\tao
set PATH=%PATH%;%ACE_ROOT%\bin;%ACE_ROOT%\lib

You can also set these using Configuration -> System -> Advanced -> Environment Variables

CORBA using OMNIORB (optional)

Boost (required)

We recommend Boost 1.40.0 for Windows. Also, unzip Boost with 7Zip or similar, but not with the default Windows unzip program, which is extremely slow.

Make sure to install these components: program_options, thread, unit_test_framework, filesystem, system.

Also add the lib directory to your PATH system environment variable:

set PATH=%PATH%;c:\orocos\boost_1_40\lib

CMake (required)

XML Parser

Setting up CMake

set(CMAKE_INCLUDE_PATH ${CMAKE_INCLUDE_PATH} 
    "c:/orocos/boost_1_40;c:/orocos/ACE_wrappers;c:/orocos/ACE_wrappers/TAO;c:/orocos/ACE_wrappers/TAO/orbsvcs")
set(CMAKE_LIBRARY_PATH ${CMAKE_LIBRARY_PATH} 
    "c:/orocos/boost_1_40/lib;c:/orocos/ACE_wrappers/lib")

set( OROCOS_TARGET win32 CACHE STRING 
     "The Operating System target. One of [lxrt gnulinux xenomai macosx win32]")

Start the cmake-gui and set your source and build paths ( For example, c:\orocos\orocos-rtt-1.10.0 and c:\orocos\orocos-rtt-1.10.0\build ). Now click 'Configure' at the bottom. Check that there are no errors. If components are missing, you probably need to fix the above PATHs.

• For RTT 1.12, turn OS_NO_ASM ON, for RTT 2.3.0, turn OS_NO_ASM OFF.

You probably need to click Configure again and then click 'Generate', which will generate your Visual Studio solution and project files in the 'build' directory.

Open the generated solution in MSVS and build the 'ALL_BUILD' target, which will build the RTT (and the unit tests if you enabled them).

Unit tests (Optional)

The unit tests will fail if the required DLLs are not in your path. In your system settings, or on the command prompt of Windows, add c:\orocos\boost_1_40\lib and c:\orocos\ACE_wrappers\lib to your PATH environment (reboot if necessary).

Next, run a 'make install' and add the c:\orocos\bin directory to your PATH (or whatever you used as install path.) In RTT 2.3.0, the default install path is c:\Program Files\orocos (so add c:\Program Files\orocos\bin to PATH). It is recommended to keep this default, since OCL uses that too.

Now you should be able to run the unit tests. The process could be a bit streamlined more and may be improved in later releases.

Installing RTT

Building OCL

OCL Dependencies

There is a separate Wiki page for enabling Readline (tab-completion) in the TaskBrowser. See Taskbrowser with readline on Windows.

Missing Features on Windows

• The RTT on Windows is not real-time ! It exists for convenience, simulation, and use by Windows GUIs.