Note that all this is rather experimental. A more detailed description on using Visual C++ to compile COGL with its dependencies can be found on the following GNOME Live! page: https://live.gnome.org/GTK%2B/Win32/MSVCCompilationOfGTKStack Please do not attempt to compile Cogl in a path that contains spaces to avoid potential problems during compilation, linking or usage. This VS9 solution and the projects it includes are intented to be used in a Cogl source tree unpacked from a tarball. In a git checkout you first need to use some Unix-like environment or manual work to expand the files needed, like config.h.win32.in into config.h.win32 and the .vcprojin files here into corresponding actual .vcproj files. You will need the parts from GNOME: GDK-Pixbuf, Pango* and GLib. External dependencies are at least zlib, libpng, gettext-runtime* and Cairo*, and glext.h from http://www.opengl.org/registry/api/glext.h (which need to be in the GL folder in your include directories or in \vs9\\include\GL). Please note that although the Cogl source package does allow one to build Cogl without a previously built and installed GLib, the Visual Studio projects only support builds that does depend on GLib. As Cogl use C99 types in lieu of GLib types, a compatible implementation of stdint.h for Visual C++ is required, such as the one from http://code.google.com/p/msinttypes/, so one would need to download and extract the .zip file from that website and extract stdint.h into \vs9\\include or somewhere where it can be found automatically found by the compiler. Note that Visual C++ 2010 and later ships with stdint.h, so it is only required for Visual C++ 2008 builds. If building the SDL2 winsys is desired (the *_SDL configs), you will also need the SDL2 libraries from www.libsdl.org-building the SDL source package with Visual C++ 2008 is recommended via CMake, but one may want to use the Visual C++ binary packages from that website. Since Cogl-1.18.x, the Visual Studio Projects have been updated to support the build of the SDL2 winsys in place of the original SDL-1.3 winsys as SDL-2.x has been released for some time. Please note, as builds with the SDL2 winsys includes the SDL2 headers, main() will be defined to SDL2's special main() implementation on Windows, which will require linking to SDL2.lib and SDL2main.lib for all apps that link to Cogl, unless SDL_MAIN_HANDLED is defined in your "preprocessor definitions" options. Please see the README file in the root directory of this Cogl source package for the versions of the dependencies required. See also build/win32/vs9/README.txt in the GLib source package for details where to unpack them. It is recommended that at least the dependencies from GNOME are also built with VS9 to avoid crashes caused by mixing different CRTs-please see also the build/win32/vs9/README.txt in those respective packages. The recommended build sequence of the dependencies are as follows (the non-GNOME packages that are not downloaded as binaries from ftp://ftp.gnome.org have makefiles and/or VS project files that can be used to compile with VS directly, except the optional PCRE, which is built on VS using CMake; GLib has VS9 project files in the latest stable versions, GDK-Pixbuf have VS9 project files in the latest unstable version, and Pango should have VS9 project files in the next unstable release): -Unzip the binary packages for gettext-runtime, freetype, expat and fontconfig downloaded from ftp://ftp.gnome.org* -zlib -libpng -(optional for GLib) PCRE (8.12 or later, building PCRE using CMake is recommended-please see build/win32/vs9/README.txt in the GLib source package) -(for gdk-pixbuf, if GDI+ is not to be used) IJG JPEG or libjpeg-turbo -(for gdk-pixbuf, if GDI+ is not to be used) jasper [JPEG-2000 library] -(for gdk-pixbuf, if GDI+ is not to be used, requires zlib and IJG JPEG/libjpeg-turbo) libtiff -GLib -Cairo -Pango -GDK-Pixbuf The "install" project will copy build results and headers into their appropriate location under \vs9\. For instance, built DLLs go into \vs9\\bin, built LIBs into \vs9\\lib and Cogl headers into \vs9\\include\Cogl-2.0. *There is no known official VS9 build support for fontconfig (along with freetype and expat) and gettext-runtime, so please use the binaries from: ftp://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/binaries/win32/dependencies/ (32 bit) ftp://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/binaries/win64/dependencies/ (64 bit) Note: If you see C4819 errors and you are compiling Cogl on a DBCS (Chinese/Korean/Japanese) version of Windows, you may need to switch to an English locale in Control Panel->Region and Languages->System-> Change System Locale, reboot and rebuild to ensure Cogl and its dependencies are built correctly. This is due to a bug in Visual C++ running on DBCS locales. --Chun-wei Fan (Adopted from the GTK+ Win32 VS README.txt file originally by Tor Lillqvist)