This is the INSTALL file for cv2pdb, a converter of DMD CodeView debug information to PDB files Copyright (c) 2009 by Rainer Schuetze, All Rights Reserved Prerequisites ------------- For this program to be useful, you should have you should have the Digital Mars D Compiler (http://www.digitalmars.com/d/2.0/dmd-windows.html) and either Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 or 2008 or one of the Express versions installed. cv2pdb uses one of the Microsoft DLLs to actually write the PDB file. Installation ------------ Sorry, there is no full featured installer available yet, you'll have to do some simple manual steps to use cv2pdb. 1. The binary package of cv2pdb contains an executable cv2pdb.exe, which should be copied somewhere accessible through your PATH environment variable. 2. cv2pdb.exe must be able to locate the DLL mspdb80.dll from the Visual Studio installation. It reads out the installation path of the latter, but if this fails, mspdb80.dll should also be accessible through your PATH environment variable. 3. For best debugging experience, you should configure Visual Studio to use C/C++ syntax highlighting for D files. This is done by navigating to the file extensions option page (found in Tools -> Options -> Text editor -> File Extensions) and adding extensions "d" and "di" with editor "Microsoft Visual C++". This will also enable display of variables in the "Auto" watch window. 4. You should also add the contents of the file autoexp.snippet to the [AutoExpand] and [Visualizer] sections of the file autoexp.dat found in \Common7\Packages\Debugger. Please note that in a standard installation of Visual Studio, the section [AutoExpand] is at the beginning of that file, followed by the section [Visualizer], which extends to the bottom of the file but a few lines for the section [hresult]. These lines will enable a convenient display of strings, dynamic arrays, associative arrays, object types and null references. 5. The file dviewhelper.dll must be copied into a directory where the debugger can find it. This can be any directory accessible through your PATH variable or \Common7\IDE. Alternatively, the full path can be specified in the corresponding entries in the [AutoExpand] section of autoexp.dat. Building from source -------------------- The source package comes with a Visual Studio 2008 project and solution that work with both the Standard and the Express version. These won't work in VS2005, but creating VS2005 projects should be easy.