This directory contains MS Visual Studio project & solution files.

#Supported Visual Studio versions

Currently supported versions are Visual Studio 2013 (our primary focus) and 2010.

#Building We are using NuGet to pull zlib and openssl dependencies. If you don't have Visual Studio NuGet plugin installed, you'll need to download nuget.exe from the web and manually restore the NuGet packages.

> REM Run from this directory.
> REM No need to do this if you have NuGet visual studio extension.
> nuget restore

After that, you can build the solution using one of these options:

1. open grpc.sln with Visual Studio and hit "Build".
2. build from commandline using msbuild grpc.sln /p:Configuration=Debug

#Testing

Use run_tests.py, that also supports Windows (with a bit limited experience).

> REM Run from repository root.
> python tools\run_tests\run_tests.py -l c

Also, you can make.bat directly to build and run gRPC tests.

> REM Run from this directory.
> make.bat alarm_test

Building protoc plugins

For generating service stub code, gRPC relies on plugins for protoc (the protocol buffer compiler). The solution grpc_protoc_plugins.sln allows you to build Windows .exe binaries of gRPC protoc plugins.

1. Open solution third_party\protobuf\vsprojects\protobuf.sln
2. Accept the conversion to newer Visual Studio version and ignore errors about gtest.
3. Build libprotoc in Release mode.
4. Open solution vsprojects\grpc_protoc_plugins.sln and build it in Release mode. As a result, you should obtain a set of gRPC protoc plugin binaries (grpc_cpp_plugin.exe, grpc_csharp_plugin.exe, ...)