This is the INSTALL file for cv2pdb, a 
converter of DMD CodeView/DWARF debug information to PDB files

Copyright (c) 2009-2010 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, 2008 or 2010 or one of the Express 
versions installed. cv2pdb uses one of the Microsoft DLLs to actually
write the PDB file.

If you are using some other program, you'll still need some
files from one of the distributions. These are mspdb80.dll, mspdbsrv.exe, 
msobj80.dll, mspdbcore.dll and msvcr90.dll from the VS2008 installation or
mspdb100.dll, mspdbsrv.exe, msobj100.dll, mspdbcore.dll and msvcr100.dll
from VS2010. They should be accessible through the PATH environment variable.
(The VS Shell is missing the msobj80.dll/msobj100.dll only). 

Installation
------------
You might want to consider installing Visual D (www.dsource.org/projects/visuald)
instead of cv2pdb. Visual D provides both project and language integration
into Visual Studio and comes with an installer that includes cv2pdb.

There is no full featured installer available for cv2pdb, 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/mspdb100.dll from the Visual
Studio installation. It tries to read the installation path of the latter from the registry, but
if this fails, mspdb80.dll/mspdb100.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 files autoexp.expand and 
autoexp.visualizer to the respective [AutoExpand] and [Visualizer]
sections of the file autoexp.dat found in 
<Visual Studio Installation Path>\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 <Visual Studio Installation Path>\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.