An extension for Visual Studio 2017/2019 which automates the use of the Conan C/C++ package manager for retrieving dependencies within Visual Studio projects.
Use the Extension Manager inside Visual Studio, or visit the Visual Studio marketplace to download it.
Visit the documentation for details on how to use the Conan Extension for Visual Studio.
Once the extension is installed, projects simply need to have a conanfile.txt or conanfile.py added to the solution. Once one of these files has been added, the conan-vs-extension will download all the project dependencies, build them if necessary, and pass the resulting paths and flags to Visual Studio through a generated .props file. Furthermore, when changing the Visual Studio project Configuration (between Release or Debug) or Platform (between x64 and x86/Win32 ), the extension will re-run Conan automatically with these new settings and download or build the required binaries. Crucially, after each run of a Conan operation, the extension will offer to refresh your Visual Studio project once the operation is complete. This refresh will be necessary for intellisense apply all the new preprocessor defintions and flags, and to reflect all the new headers.
In order to be able to build extension from the source, you need Visual Studio 2017 or 2019 installed. All required components Visual Studio components are listed in the .vsconfig file in the repository root. Just open the Conan.VisualStudio.sln solution, and IDE will display a prompt to install missing components:
If you want to build the extension yourself and test it locally (perhaps because you are making changes for a PR), you can currently test the extension one of two ways: Debug Mode and Local VSIX Installation.
Most likely, you should just run your changes in debug mode. Open the Conan.VisualStudio.sln file using the Visual Studio 2017 or 2019 and Run the project. It will create an isolated Visual Studio environment and load the extension.
Note: This can take up to a minute or two.
Alternatively, you may want to build the VSIX and share with a few other developers. In that case, just "Build" the Release configuration of project in Visual Studio. You can build from a Developer Command prompt with this command:
$ msbuild /p:Configuration=Release
It will output the .vsix file to:
Conan.VisualStudio\bin\Release\Conan.VisualStudio.vsix
From there, you can share and/or install the .vsix file as desired. Here is a decent blog post about working with .vsix files manually
Once you have the Visual Studio environment with the modified extension loaded, or have installed the extension from the .vsix file, you can test it by opening one of the examples in the Conan.VisualStudio.Examples directory:
This extension was started by community members like @sboullema, @SSE4, @ForNeVer and @solvingj, thanks to them the first version of the extension was given birth and now the Conan team is supporting it and pushing it forward. We still receive very valuable contributions from the community and we hope to continue to receive them.
Each version and the released features are summarized in the CHANGELOG file. Feel free to request new features and follow the evolution of incoming ones in the issues and pull requests of this repository.