[CMake] [vtkusers] Fwd: CMAKE_MAKE_PROGRAM is not set - Win7 and Visual Studio 10

[John Drescher]

> The question is: what is the location of the make program?
>
> If I remember correctly, on Windows XP, I did not have to install MinGW to
> compile VTK. Just Visual Studio Express was required.
>
> Do I have to install MinGW?

Not unless you want to move your development to MinGW.

>Or is it provided by VS?
>

This should be devenv.com or msbuild.exe (located in your system .NET
location). However I believe the express version of VisualStudio does
not work with MSBuild so make it the location of devenv.com

>
> A more general question, what is the recommended way to compile VTK on
> Windows?

I am not sure about recommended however I build vtk from the command
line via a Visual Studio command prompt.

I first configure VTK to turn off shared libraries because I want to
avoid having to copy dlls around.

cmake --build PathToBuildFolderForVTK --config Debug
cmake --build PathToBuildFolderForVTK --config Release
cmake --build PathToBuildFolderForVTK --config RelWithDebInfo

After that I do not install VTK. Since the INSTALL will only install a
single configuration. I instead point my own projects that use cmake
to use the vtk build folder as VTK_DIR and CMake is happy to set it up
so that my debug configurations will use debug vtk libs and my release
applications will use release vtk libs.

John