Upgrading your wxWidgets project to Visual Studio 8.0

Ok, so I finally found some time to start using my brand-new MS Visual Studio 2005 and try and compile my projects with it. As usual, moving to the next major version of a Microsoft Compiler involves a lot of work. Here is what I found so far:

Warnings, warnings, warnings...
The first thing you'll notice are hundreds of warnings. In an effort to make software more secure, MS has depreciated many runtime library functions that where the cause of so many buffer overflows. No more strcpy, strdup, localtime etc... Same with std::copy and other functions that are being used by the C++ standard runtime library.
I am not sure I really like this. This seems like a good idea at first, but only for new projects. For all other projects, people are probably simply going to disable the warnings. That is what I recommend when you upgrade your projects. Especially your wxWidgets projects, since the recommended replacement functions strcpy_s, localtime_c etc... are MS-specific and not found in any other compiler I know of.

So, in your project, define these macros

#define _CRT_SECURE_NO_DEPRECATE
tell the compiler to stop complaining about using localtime etc...

#define _SCL_SECURE_NO_DEPRECATE
stop complaining about std::copy etc...

The best place to do this is in your precompiled header file such as stdwx.h, if you have one. Of course you can add these defines to the project file itself, but you'll have to add them to all configurations.

POSIX vs. ISO
More warnings: Microsoft also depreciated all Posix names. Did you know strcpy should actually be called _strcpy in the ISO standard? I know now. All Posix names - and there are many - have been depreciated in favor of the new ISO standard. Good idea? Probably. Someone has to make a start. But unless you are willing to spend time changing your code and your gnu or whatever other compiler you are using supports it, you'll want to disable these warnings as well:

#define _CRT_NONSTDC_NO_DEPRECATE
to stop complaining about old POSIX names

Manifest
If you include the wx.rc file - which you should -, you will get an error when you compile your project with VC 8.0: invalid COFF or something. The new 8.0 linker has the ability to generate a manifest file on the fly and the .dsp/.sln conversion wizard enables this by default. So now your application has two manifest files, one included via wx.rc and the new one generated by the linker. The linker does not like this. You have two options.

1. Define wxUSE_NO_MANIFEST to stop using the wxWidgets manifest file. You must change the file settings for your .rc file and include this define there. Using the precompiled header file as mentioned above won't work.
2. Disable the linker|manifest option: Open the properties for your project. Select 'all configurations', open the linker settings, manifest file and set 'generate manifest' to no.

I recommend the first option as it lets the linker create a manifest with all the correct DLL side-by-side information. If you disable the linker|manifest option, a debug build may not find the MSVCP80D.DLL for example and you have to copy the DLL into your path. If the linker creates the manifest file, all the correct DLL paths are being used.