- Visual Studio 2019/2022 (2022 recommended). Install the "Desktop development with C++" workload.
- Windows 10 SDK (most recent version recommended)
- (Optional) To build for ARM64, the following Visual Studio components should be installed:
- MSVC v143 - VS 2022 C++ ARM64 build tools (Latest)
- (Optional) To build with Clang (using the experimental Debug-LLVM solution configuration), the following Visual Studio components should be installed:
- C++ Clang tools for Windows
- (Optional) To build the installer, WiX 3.11 and the relevant Visual Studio extension should be installed. Download links for both of those items can be found on the WiX website.
vcpkg is used to manage dependencies. Before you can build Explorer++, you'll first need to initialize vcpkg:
git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/derceg/explorerplusplus.git
cd explorerplusplus
.\Explorer++\ThirdParty\vcpkg\bootstrap-vcpkg.bat
The relevant packages should then be automatically installed during the first build.
Open Explorer++\Explorer++.sln
. From within Visual Studio, select Debug
> Start Without Debugging
to compile and run the program.
Building the program in release mode will also build all of the translations. The resulting DLLs can then be used with Explorer++.
The TestExplorer++
project contains unit tests for the solution as a whole. The GoogleTest package is installed via vcpkg, so provided vcpkg has been initialized and you've been able to build the solution, you should just need to build the TestExplorer++
project, then run the tests via the Visual Studio Test Explorer.
Note that the TestHelper
project is older and is in the process of being removed. It doesn't currently compile and shouldn't be used.