Visual Studio 2012 EXPRESS and ObjectArx 2015

[Anonymous]

Hi,

maybe I'm just a bit dummy, but I wasn't able to find anywhere a clear answer for the following question:

"Is Visual Studio 2012 EXPRESS EDITION compatible with ObjectArx 2015?"

I found in the documentation the following: "Microsoft Visual Studio 2012 Update 4 SHOULD be used when compiling projects for use with AutoCAD 2015"

I read,  a lot of discusions regarding the compatibility between VS Express and ObjectArx WIZARD but nothing about the compatibility of VS Exp itself.

Anyway, recently I tried to port a project created with VS Professional  under VS Express after having dropped all the references to MFC and/or ATL.

Nevertheless when I tried to compile it I got a link error saying that it was'nt possible to find the  the atls.lib (!). I realized after that the atls.lib was required by the acrxGetApiVersion() function that is a mandatory symbol required at loading time by AutoCad....

After this experience I went back to  VS Professional....

 Luciano

[Anonymous]

VS Express doesn't support MFC, which it seems is required for compiling ObjectARX dll's (hence the atls.lib requirement), even if you don't intend to use MFC.

My first attempt to recify the situation was to download the WinDDK, which has older MFC headers/libs, but this didn't work (apparently they were too old).

That said I have found a workaround.  You can download the full 2012 professional install from the MSDN website (not sure exactly of the link, using google a bit should find it).  You only have to install it, you don't have to activate or run it (which you can't without a license), to use the 2012 toolset.  So you can use a more recent version of Studio (in my case I'm using the VS 2015 Ultimate preview, which is free for a few months), or if you want to handle all the MFC code by hand (it isn't actually that bad) you could use an express version (like 2013 express).  In both cases just make sure you select the 2012 toolset.

[owenwengerd]

The atls.lib reference is a bug in the ObjectARX SDK. You can just set your linker property 'Ignore specific library' to ignore atls.lib and your project will build and run fine.

[Anonymous]

Thanks a lot! I will try you suggestions as soon as my VS2012 PROF trial version expires...for the third time.