Compiled wxWidgets (wxMSW Windows port) libraries for Visual C++ 7.1

Download and Installation
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History

Recently there's been some discussion whether or not the wxWidgets team should provide official binaries for the Windows platform. Being a lazy person myself, I can understand those unwilling to compile wxWidgets everytime there's a new release. Also when using wxMSW in a team project you might want to make sure there's binary identity for the libraries each team member uses, because non-identical libraries can be a source for unwanted different behaviour. On the other hand, using compiled binaries requires some trust towards the person building the binaries and most likely creates another area with need of support in case of linking problems for the provider of the binaries. Another problem is that wxWidgets is highly customizable, and it's hard to decide which features should be included in an offical build.
Nonetheless, I decided to make the binaries I'm using myself available for download.

As mentioned, the customizability of wxWidgets imposes limits on binary builds. Some of those limits are:

• My build was created with the Visual C++ 7.1 compiler and should only be used with exactly the same compiler.
• Only "release" builds are available, no debug builds.
• Only "shared" builds are available, i.e. DLLs but no statically linkable libraries.
• The build is not a monolithic one, so there are a number of smaller DLLs instead of one big DLL.
• Only the default components are included.

So what you get is:

• Import libraries (.lib), export files (.exp) and DLLs, ready for use.
• Build contains both ANSI and Unicode versions of wxWidgets.

Important! Things you should do to compile your own projects with these binaries are:

• You must provide the preprocessor symbol "WXUSINGDLL" at compile time, e.g. via the compiler parameter /DWXUSINGDLL.
• Link against the right import libraries. If you want the Unicode build, link against the .libs containing an "u" in the filename, for example wxbase26u.lib. If you want the ANSI build, likewise link against those without an "u" in the filename, for example wxbase26.lib. There are libraries without Unicode counterparts, like wxzlib.lib. Link against those even when using an Unicode build.
• If you want to use Unicode in your project, don't forget to define the proper symbols: /DUNICODE and /D_UNICODE.
  Attention: Support for MSLU is not enabled, so Unicode will not work on Windows 9x, only on NT and newer versions of Windows.
• The libraries are linked against the dynamic multithreaded release run-time library of Visual C++ 7.1 (msvcr71.dll), so you should use the same for your project. Use the compiler parameter /MD for that.
• Make sure to include the right wx/setup.h.
  • Method 1: If you explicitly provided the right preprocessor symbols like "WXUSINGDLL" and "_UNICODE" (like you should have!) and use Visual C++, you can set an additional include path to %WXWIN%\include\msvc\. The stub wx/setup.h there automagically includes the right wx/setup.h (from %WXWIN%\lib\vc_dll\msw or %WXWIN%\lib\vc_dll\mswu) depending on the defined preprocessor symbols.
  • Method 2: Manually set an additional include path to %WXWIN%\lib\vc_dll\msw when using ANSI and to %WXWIN%\lib\vc_dll\mswu when using Unicode. This has the disadvantage (compared to method 1) that you must change your include path whenever you switch between ANSI and Unicode.
  Note: %WXWIN% here depicts the path to your wxWidgets main directory.

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Download and Installation

Installation:

• At first, download wxMSW at the official page of wxWidgets: http://www.wxwidgets.org/dl_msw2.htm#stable. Make sure to download the .zip archive, not the Setup.exe.
• If you downloaded the .zip to c:\wx, extract it in the same folder. You'll get a new subfolder like c:\wx\wxWidgets-2.6.3.
• Download the binary libraries archive from here to c:\wx and extract it in the same folder. This will place the compiled libraries into the folder c:\wx\wxWidgets-2.6.3\lib. Select "Yes" if prompted for overwriting files.

Download links for the latest release:

Link	Description	Size
Binary libraries for wxMSW 2.6.3-1 with Patch 2	Latest stable release with Patch 2. Read notes!	~6.80 MB
Binary libraries for wxMSW 2.6.3-1	Latest stable release including Patch 1, i.e. from wxMSW-2.6.3-1.zip.	~6.80 MB

Notes for Patch 2 for wxMSW 2.6.3:

Patch 2 (available from http://www.wxwidgets.org/patch.htm#patches263) fixes some minor issues.
It does not affect any headers, so you should be able to use the binaries with headers from the wxMSW 2.6.3-1 .zip from http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/wxwindows/wxMSW-2.6.3-1.zip?download.

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Download links for former releases:

Link	Description	Size
Binary libraries for wxMSW 2.6.3	Latest stable release without Patch 01, i.e. from wxMSW-2.6.3.zip. This is here just for completeness, don't use.	~6.80 MB
Binary libraries for wxMSW 2.6.2	Former stable release	~6.89 MB
Binary libraries for wxMSW 2.6.1 with Patch 01	Former stable release with Patch 01. Read notes!	~6.79 MB
Binary libraries for wxMSW 2.6.1	Former stable release	~6.79 MB
Binary libraries for wxMSW 2.6.0	Former stable release	~6.72 MB

Notes for Patch 01 for wxMSW 2.6.1:

Additionally to downloading the .zip for wxWidgets 2.6.1 from http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/wxwindows/wxMSW-2.6.1.zip?download, you'll need to download and extract the Patch 01 from http://www.wxwidgets.org/patch.htm#patches261 (as documented on the linked site).

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For the records, the exact commands used to compile these binaries are

nmake -f makefile.vc BUILD=release SHARED=1 and

nmake -f makefile.vc BUILD=release SHARED=1 UNICODE=1

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Contact

If you want to drop me an email (for feedback, improvement suggestions, criticism, questions and such) feel free to mail to c.buck(at}gmx.de.

Attention: Please replace the '(at}' with an '@'. This is a protection against spam bots.

I prefer to receive PGP encrypted mail (see http://www.gnupg.org/ or http://www.pgpi.com/). My public key as ASCII is available here.

Christian Buck

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History

Note: Dates are in dd.mm.yyyy format.

08.06.2005 Started this site with wxMSW 2.6.0 and 2.6.1
01.07.2005 Added wxMSW 2.6.1 Patchlevel 01
22.09.2005 Added wxMSW 2.6.2
26.03.2006 Added wxMSW 2.6.3
30.03.2006 Added wxMSW 2.6.3-1 (wxMSW 2.6.3 with Patch 1)
06.04.2006 Added wxMSW 2.6.3-1 with Patch 2