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I am pretty new to programming. I would like to download an open source project and build it in my Microsoft Visual Studio 2008. In fact, I tried to import and build the application WinSCP:
https://sourceforge.net/projects/winscp/

But I didn’t work. Please can somebody help me and tell me which files do I have to download (from sourceforge) and how to import these into Microsoft Visual Studio in order to build the application. Thank you a lot. David

Martin Prikryl
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4 Answers4

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WinSCP seems to be written in Borland C++ Builder or whatever it's called today. It's not a standard C++ program and wouldn't compile in any other compiler because it uses special features only present in BCB. (It uses Delphi-style components, VCL and thus the __property keyword.)

Unfortunately, a lot of Open Source projects have very poor support for Microsoft's development tools. One project that comes to mind as being not too big and having workable MSVC project files is FreeType2, but that's a library and not an application, which probably makes it not very interesting for toying around with.

nielsm
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  • Hi, thank you for your suggestion. I would like to search for some security issues with some selected C++ Source Code Analysers, therefore I would prefere to import some project with some network communication. Please do you know some small application, with some network communication that could be imported and build in MV2008? Thank you a lot. –  Oct 04 '09 at 13:07
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In support forum of winscp, they say, that you can't compile this project in Visual Studio.

Jasmin25
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Winscp appears to be a CPP project using a makefile instead of a sln file. VS uses SLN and *proj files to control builds and such. A good way to start would be to open VS, create a new console project (and solution) and go through some tutorials online.

If you really want to just see how a large project works in VS, grab something like IronRuby or IronPython or even something like the Witty twitter client.

Jim Deville
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  • I would like to get a really small project to use it for source code analyses. Do you know some plugin or some small project, that I can open and build in VS2008? I couldnt find anything useful on sourceforge.net just this Winscp, but its too large - as you said. If the project would also have a known list of several bugs - that would be really great. –  Oct 01 '09 at 20:41
  • email me jdeville at Microsoft.com. I have a small program i can give you. – Jim Deville Oct 01 '09 at 22:49
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In the general case, it is not possible to pour the C++ sources of a program into Visual Studio and expect it to work. C++ programming environments are far too different between operating systems for that. If you have a open-source program which builds and runs fine on Linux (for example), it may need several weeks (or months) or programming effort to make it run on Windows.

JesperE
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