Building OpenSTA
Before building OpenSTA you need to make sure you have fulfilled all the BuildingPrerequisites. Once you have fulfilled these you are ready to build OpenSTA and can proceed with the following instructions:
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Open the src/FullBuild.dsw Visual Studio Workspace file. This takes some time to load as there are 84 projects contained in this workspace and making up the OpenSTA toolset.
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Once open you should select the Build>Batch Build menu item.
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Here's the laborious bit; there are 84 Debug configurations that you absolutely don't want (even if you think you want them, you don't! they are mostly broken) these must each be unticked. Sorry but at least you will have to do this just once, the .opt file stores this setting. From release 1.4.2 the DSW now only contains the Release builds so this step is no longer required. With only the Release builds ticked you can now hit the Build button.
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Find something interesting to do ... it takes a long time and watching the log is very dull ;-)
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Once finished check all the log, there should be no errors or warnings. I then do a second Batch Build, I do this because Visual Studio does weird things with dependencies and I don't really trust it ... sometimes it will rebuild projects again for seemingly no reason. Most of these unneeded rebuild issues have now actually been tracked down and fixed in CVS.
When you are happy with the build, you may have been making changes which of course will involve more work, then you are ready to create an Installation.
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Open the src/Installer/OpenSTA.sln Visual Studio solution file.
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Select the Release configuration from the Build>Build Configuration menu.
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Select Build>Build Solution (Ctrl+Shift+B) to produce the installation.
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There's an error message about Merge modules not being able to contain dialogs, it doesn't seem to hurt. If you can show us who to get rid of this please send mail to the DeveloperMailingList.
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Once finished your installable MSI will be in the Distribution/DISK_1 directory
This installation won't ask you to do the required reboot after install or removal. Also the OpenSTA directory is only created for the installing user not All Users. These are limitations of the MSI builder. If you want to correct these issues it can be done using an MSI editor, instructions of how to do this are in the INSTALL.txt file in your OpenSTA sources root directory.
Any problem or ideas about building OpenSTA should be discussed on the DeveloperMailingList
FrequentlyAskedQuestions.
